Connecting the Dots on AI: Make AI Work in All Conditions (Well, Almost!)

The AI Institute is focused on helping organizations make AI work in the real world by expanding its relationships with the AI thought leaders

Artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing by leaps and bounds along three simultaneous dimensions: technology, applications, and implications.

As AI technologies continue to improve at mind-boggling speed, new and disruptive AI use cases and business applications are emerging every day across a wide range of industries. These trends in turn are driving AI adoption and giving rise to a broad set of implications that touch everything from AI policies and AI ethics to data privacy, cybersecurity, risk management, and regulatory compliance.

Deloitte’s AI Institute was created to tie all these dimensions together, serving as a definitive and comprehensive source of information, insight, and discussion for everything related to AI.

The Institute taps into all the avenues where AI is being researched, defined, and developed–from startups, venture capitalists, and academia to industry experts, research firms, thinktanks, and mature AI product companies (and everything in between). It then combines those insights with Deloitte’s deep business, technology, and applied AI expertise to start conversations and develop industry-specific use cases and practical implementation approaches that address AI’s unique challenges– helping organizations generate real value with AI in record time.

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AI is both a business imperative and work-in-progress

Even before COVID-19, AI was gaining traction as an essential business capability for organizations in every global region and industry. However, as organizations around the world cope with the pandemic and start positioning themselves for a post-crisis future, many are deloitte  to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their operations and build competitive advantage over the long term.

This new impetus is pushing the pace of AI adoption even faster.

Unfortunately, AI has not yet reached the level of maturity where organizations can just buy the solutions they need off the shelf and then put them into production. Not even close. Instead, AI innovation remains scattered across countless diverse sources in business and academia. Also, the maturity of AI innovations varies widely, ranging from unproven hype to fully formed real-world solutions that are ready to deliver value immediately.

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Meanwhile, the rise of AI is presenting organizations with a complex mix of new and difficult challenges, including issues related to risk, ethics and fairness, privacy and transparency, social responsibility, cybersecurity, and regulatory compliance.

For AI, this is a unique period of rapid innovation, similar to when automobiles began to replace the horse and buggy – but even more dramatic and impactful.

Back then, automotive technology was advancing rapidly and business innovators were busy dreaming up new and valuable uses for motor vehicles. Yet, critical implications such as traffic laws, licenses, high speed roads, and auto insurance weren’t fully addressed until much later when adoption began to rise.

Connecting the dots

The AI Institute brings together the best thinking and innovations from every layer of the AI ecosystem– starting conversations and connecting the dots using an enterprise-specific lens to develop compelling AI use cases and practical approaches that make sense for today’s organizations.

Industry-specific AI use cases

AI technology is advancing at breakneck speed. Thanks to developments in areas such as Quantum Computing, Edge Computing, Natural Language Processing, Cloud-Based AI Platforms and building blocks, and new machine learning models, smart machines are getting smarter – with an ever-improving ability to think, sense, and converse like humans.

However, just as different industries often require unique business processes and workers with unique skills and expertise, the most valuable AI use cases are often specific to a particular type of business or industry.

For those critical AI applications, generic off-the-shelf solutions just aren’t good enough – or don’t exist at all – leaving organizations with little choice but to figure things out for themselves.

The AI Institute is actively working to fill this gap by combining the latest AI thinking and innovations with Deloitte’s real-world business and technology expertise to develop industry-specific use cases that harness the full power of AI.

Trustworthy AI

AI adoption isn’t just a technology and business challenges, it’s also a social challenge. Organizations need AI they can trust – not only to effectively execute the assigned tasks, but to do so reliably and responsibly.

In a recent Deloitte study of AI enterprise trends, nearly all surveyed organizations (95%) expressed concerns about ethical risks for their AI initiatives. What’s more, 56%said their organizationsare slowing adoption of AI technologies because of the emerging risks, and the same percentage believe that negative public perceptions will slow or stop adoption of some AI technologies.

The AI institute is providing thought leadership on all six pillars of Deloitte’s Trustworthy AI framework, helping organizations deploy AI that is:

(1) robust and reliable;

(2) transparent and explainable;

(3) fair and impartial;

(4) responsible and accountable;

(5) safe and secure; and

(6) protective of privacy.

Practical implementation approaches

When implementing AI, the devil is in the details.

Can you buy off-the-shelf solutions and tailor them to your needs, or do you need to build them from scratch (and do you have access to the expertise and capabilities required to make that happen)?

Do you have the high-quality data and robust technology infrastructure necessary to support AI?

And, how will you integrate AI “workers” and human workers?

Science fiction aside, AI workers won’t be completely replacing their human counterparts any time soon. In fact, Deloitte refers to the current AI era as “The Age of With” –machines working with humans to give them superhuman capabilities while also freeing them up to focus on higher-value tasks that require broad judgment, intuition, and other capabilities that remain uniquely human.

What’s next and How to Make AI Work in Real World?

The AI Institute is focused on helping organizations make AI work in the real world.

To that end, it is rapidly expanding its relationships with other AI thought leaders that are redefining what’s possible. It is also establishing partnerships with innovative product companies that offer the tools and technologies organizations need to turn their AI visions and strategies into reality.

AI is reshaping the business landscape and becoming an essential source of future competitive advantage for many industries.

Deloitte AI Institute helps organizations understand how to leverage AI to thrive in that AI-enabled future – and how to get there as quickly and efficiently as possible.