Artificial Intelligence: Why the Hype? General Assembly Hosts Michael Housman

By Dr. Michael Housman | January 10, 2018

General Assembly hosts Michael Housman, Chief Data Scientist at RapportBoost.AI, for a live webinar meet-up about the phenomenon of AI.

"Everyone talks about artificial intelligence solving all the problems of the world. That may be true, but at the core of AI, it can do two things. It can automate repetitive tasks by predicting outcomes on data that has been labeled by human beings. This is especially true of image and audio files. We’re currently training lots and lots of algorithms to recognize images and to transcribe audio. That’s essentially how Siri and Alexa work. Those things basically automate what human beings do. They don’t do any better than human beings. What we do is hope that they’ll do as well as human beings so we can automate those tasks. We’re also able to train algorithms to enhance human decision making. So if we move past human labels, and we think about training algorithms based on outcomes like stock returns or fraud, or claims, or ROI for marketing, what we can actually do is help human beings do better by offering up information trained on millions and billions of data points that no human being would ever be able to understand."

While AI lags behind humans in being able to complete complex tasks, what it can do is automate simple, repetitive tasks. AI can augment human capabilities, fielding low-level tasks freeing human agents to focus on high-level engagements. According to Gartner's The Road to Enterprise AI, AI will be a top investment priority by 2020. General Assembly hosts Michael Housman in another short video that explains how AI can automate live chat by offering predictive, prescriptive and personalized recommendations to customers while guiding live chat agent behavior to be as effective as possible.

Contact our team at RapportBoost.AI to learn more about our live chat agent training solutions. We'll tell you all about AI - minus the hype.

Dr. Michael Housman

About Dr. Michael Housman

Michael has spent his entire career applying state-of-the-art statistical methodologies and econometric techniques to large data-sets in order to drive organizational decision-making and helping companies operate more effectively. Prior to founding RapportBoost.AI, he was the Chief Analytics Officer at Evolv (acquired by Cornerstone OnDemand for $42M in 2015) where he helped architect a machine learning platform capable of mining databases consisting of hundreds of millions of employee records. He was named a 2014 game changer by Workforce magazine for his work. Michael is currently an equity advisor for a half-dozen technology companies based out of the San Francisco bay area: hiQ Labs, Bakround, Interviewed, Performiture, Tenacity, Homebase, and States Title. He was on Tony’s advisory board at Boopsie from 2012 onward. Michael is a noted public speaker and has published his work in a variety of peer-reviewed journals and has had his research profiled by The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and The Atlantic. Dr. Housman received his A.M. and Ph.D. in Applied Economics and Managerial Science from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and his A.B. from Harvard University.

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