It’s Time to Invest in Artificial Intelligence

Just how often do you use voice recognition devices at home, live traffic maps when driving to and from a destination, and a mailbox that filters your emails into essential and non-essential when at work? There is no doubt that just some of the tools and technologies you use everyday are being powered by artificial intelligence (AI), helping you to go about your everyday life in an easier and more efficient way. Almost half of businesses believe AI will profoundly transform their industry, but only a third feel their organisation has the skills to adapt, according to a new survey by the Confederation of British Industry in association with IBM. AI is rapidly taking over and reshaping all aspects of our domain. Now is the time to make the switch and invest in AI or you may soon be pushed aside by advancing and innovative competitors. Just what are the capabilities and possibilities of AI in the workplace and who is currently paving the way?  

Watson

Named after IBM’s first CEO Thomas J. Watson, the IBM supercomputer combines AI and sophisticated analytical software for optimal performance as a ‘question-answering’ machine. Processing at a rate of 80 teraflops (trillion floating-point operations per second), the Watson replicates and can even surpass a high-functioning human’s ability to answer questions – the computer even managed to win a US quiz game show in 2011 against top-rated competitors. The supercomputer can access 90 servers with a combined data store of more than 200 million pages of information, which it processes against six million ‘logic rules’.  

How is Watson helping organisations?

Watson has certainly been put to use and has so far been used in fashion to design a dress, in the food industry to create recipes and in entertainment to make a movie trailer. The latest news is that IBM is now doing deals with General Motors (GM), the fast-growing workplace messaging app Slack, and the world’s largest education company Pearson. These partnerships will see Watson helping, respectively, with roadside assistance, business messaging, and education. It would seem the possibilities for Watson are endless, and more and more organisations are interested in how they can benefit from this AI supercomputer.  

SeeQuestor

If your organisation uses video surveillance, you will understand just how frustrating it can be for people within the company to trawl through hours upon hours of footage just to find a two-minute clip – it is extremely time consuming and costly. SeeQuestor is an integrated software and hardware toolset, designed to dramatically increase the speed at which police and security teams analyse video. It uses deep learning and affordable supercomputers to find the people you are looking for in a fraction of the time it would take a member of your business. People of interest can be found by searching for attributes on SeeQuestor such as ‘glasses’, ‘red jacket’, ‘male’, ‘blonde hair’ and more.  

How is SeeQuestor helping organisations?

Innovations such as SeeQuestor have the potential to save organisations a huge amount of time and resources. The manual analysis of video is very inefficient and there is the distinct possibility that human error will occur, leading to even more time and money spent looking for the footage needed. The service is already having a significant impact on the police force, and other public sector and commercial security teams – SCC has been working closely with the police to implement this new technology. With 64% of criminal cases involving CCTV footage and 95% of police believing that video footage is important in convictions, there is a real demand for this type of service. At SCC, we provide a range of technical services and AI video surveillance to help boost your business and propel it in front of the competition. <!– Find out how the SCC AI Video Analytics Service can benefit you –>