A lot of us (vendors) are claiming to have AI built into our platforms. Heck, we do it here at PropFuel too... we have a sentiment analysis element that we baked in to read words and determine if they're negative, neutral or positive. And then there's the key word analysis... Cool, right? but is it enough to claim AI?
Maybe, maybe not. The problem is that enough of us are screaming AI when the real value is automation. AI has it's place, as does automation, so I wanted to write this post to explain the difference as I understand it. Having said that, I'm still learning. I'm no expert, so send me your thoughts. Tell me where I got this wrong.
Automation takes us back to the industrial revolution where we got machines to do the repetitive work humans were doing. Factories embraced automation to improve consistency in quality, reduce labor costs and reduce injury. The part that has evolved is moving automation into the office (marketing automation, feedback automation). And now is often used as a tool to interact with humans, automating the ability to filter out what/who truly needs the human touch and what/who doesn't.
But, automation is not intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence is related automation. They don't compete. In fact, they work nicely together. AI has the ability categorize and classify large amounts of data, which is then utilized in automation to do something with it. Said another way, AI provides the opportunity to make decisions based on lots of different data driven scenarios and automation is what takes action. So you see AI is not very helpful without automation baked into it. Then there's machine learning, which is AI that's been trained to improve and get better at something as it makes observations.
AI and automation will not replace you, but they are great tools to help you do your job better. With all the intelligence and automation, we're still not at the point where computers can understand WHY the data is the way it is. They can only interpret WHAT is happening and make decisions on that.
That's where the human wins, if we understand WHY things are happening. We can act with emotional intelligence where it's just science fiction right now for computers to do that effectively.
And there's the segue to me selling PropFuel. Do you understand WHY your members are making the decisions they are? If you're not capturing the Voice of the Member, which includes high levels of automation and low levels of AI, then you're probably no better than a fancy computer that looks at the data and makes decisions based on WHAT your members are doing. Capturing the WHY will help you understand your members better and therefore service them better.
Let's use AI and automation to help us be better at what we do best as humans, understand the why.
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