For years, there’s been a lot of excitement around the power of artificial intelligence (AI). From the promising and bold predictions by industry analytics to the high-profile appearances in the media like IBM Watson’s successful run on the TV show Jeopardy, it’s clear that AI has been having its moment. But in my discussions with companies and clients, it’s also clear that sometimes the impact of AI has yet to live up to the excitement. Many are still at the very beginning of their AI journey when it comes to delivering real value in their business operations.
So, it seems at times like the real impact of AI is always just around the corner: a future vision that promises to merge the powers of human-like intelligence with the speed and data processing powers of computers. While it’s certainly true that the complete potential of AI is yet to be realized, right now it’s already providing real and attainable value to organizations that pursue it. AI is powering tangible business results across industries by making experts better, processes smarter and data work harder.
AI is already helping insurers get better at detecting fraudulent claims, helping marketers understand how millions of people feel about their brands and enabling students to find the best path to success in higher education. While the list goes on and on, a shorter list of innovative, proven and accessible technology, such as IBM Watson, is making these innovations a reality. With these tools at hand, CIOs are looking within their own organizations for creative opportunities to use AI to drive real value for their businesses.
Put your enterprise data to work using AI
Virtually every organization has large amounts of data that are not delivering tangible value because they are siloed, unorganized, unstructured or inaccessible. These areas are ideal targets for AI tools like IBM Watson because it has the capability to ingest structured and unstructured data, detect patterns, and by continuously learning, will deliver insights that were never before possible.
At Lighthouse Computer Services, we’ve been helping clients use Watson AI to bring value to their organizations. For example, we’ve helped clientsP
Attract and retain more students in higher education: To select courses, students often search a wide catalog of course descriptions, schedules, instructors and academic requirements. Time spent with overburdened advisors often focuses on logistical details and degree requirements, leaving little time for other key considerations and preferences.
To meet this challenge, Lighthouse’s Minerva Cognitive Solutions powers personalized, intelligent course selection decision support, taking advantage of IBM® Watson™ APIs, to find courses that meet many criteria, drawn from both structured and unstructured data such as written personal statements. This AI is helping improve student decision-making effectiveness and enabling advisors to offer an optimal level of guidance to a wider audience of students.
Identify brand sentiment using social media: Unstructured text data across platforms—like Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, and more—contains valuable insights about brands, their markets and their competitors. Yet, such vast data volumes make it a huge challenge to capture, monitor, visualize, model and interpret this data in meaningful ways. Powered by IBM and Watson, Lighthouse provides a powerful Social Media Analytics tool to discover customer sentiment, opinion and demographics from millions of online sources. The solution correlates multiple words, concepts and associations in unstructured social media data to discover trends and analyze markets.
It’s enabling our clients to review their share of voice with their peers in real time and monitor social sentiment about their brand, competitors and the market. It’s helping them answer key marketing questions, so they can make decisive actions across the enterprise.
There are many other areas where we could help companies use Watson to make an impact. For example, AI can help:
Detect fraudulent property & casualty claims: In claims cases, large volumes of notes are often sent back and forth between claims adjusters, lawyers and doctors. While these notes contain valuable information, often insurers can’t use them to improve fraud detection as it would be too time intensive for claims analysts to read through all of them and give their opinion. However, if these notes are digital, an insurer can put them into Watson, train it for specific indicators of fraud, and have sentiment bubble to the top of the case to identify fraudulent claims.
In all of these areas, artificial intelligence is really about “augmenting intelligence”. It doesn’t replace the student advisor, the marketing expert or the claims analyst. AI helps them do their jobs more effectively, at larger scale and at faster speeds, than they could have done without it.
Get started with AI or start moving faster
Whether you are exploring the capabilities of AI for the first time or looking to speed your results to enhance your existing capabilities, Lighthouse is here to help. IBM Watson technology runs on IBM Cloud and its capabilities are available through an easily managed subscription service. Our team of experts will help you prepare Watson to understand the language of your industry and to exploit opportunities that will address the needs of your business.
It’s time to realize the true value of AI’s capabilities and the tremendous impact it will have on the future growth of your organization. Let’s get started.