AI + AI does not augmented intelligence make

IBM and Salesforce made an interesting announcement recently that they’re combining the robust Artificial Intelligence technologies of IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein into a powerhouse solution for customers. They’re calling it IBM Bluewolf’s "augmented intelligence" solution for telecommunications.

The announcement showcases the power of putting multiple artificial intelligence solutions together for new, more robust, connected capabilities delivered to customers more quickly. While we’re well on our way to augmenting intelligence, we have a long ways to go before claiming we’ve augmented intelligence.

By design, artificial intelligence mimics human intelligence, though it might be faster and at greater scale. That’s because its underlying technology -- AI algorithms -- are built to replicate the human brain. While bringing the accuracy and scale of machines to human intellect has the potential to provide insight and help us overcome challenges in every discipline, it’s still human intelligence.

Take IBM’s Bluewolf. By combining information like pricing and customer behavior across two different AI solutions, Bluewolf enables all kinds of new ways for telecommunications companies to engage with their customers, see a more complete picture about how individual customers behave online and predict future behaviors. While these insights are all helpful, they aren’t anything a human brain couldn’t come up with on its own.

To augment intelligence, we must look beyond AI and beyond human cognition, and instead, combine human and machine expertise to produce insights that wouldn’t be possible by either human or machine alone. To do so, we need technologies that fundamentally change the way we process information: changing the type of data the human brain receives about the physical world, the information the brain can access, and ultimately affecting the way the brain identifies patterns and casual relationships.

True Augmented Intelligence solutions could be used to address even bigger challenges faced by telecoms, from optimizing the growth of their networks to setting pricing strategies to helping executives plan for the maintenance and upgrade of equipment based on technology’s ever-changing disruption of the status quo.

For example: the knowledge acquired about telecom customers with IBM Bluewolf’s solution could be used to create a predictive behavior model, which could be used to inform pricing, business planning or product roadmap. That’s something companies can do with AI today. Yet with Augmented Intelligence, a team could be onsite looking at a transmission station, and using augmented reality, capture data on the risk factors for different pieces of equipment. They could then send all that data back to HQ to create a model about the likelihood of equipment failure over the next twelve months, and then integrate that model with others, such as a predictive pricing model from Bluewolf, and a model simulating how salaries for technicians who can repair a specific piece of equipment will change over the next decade, giving executives the ability to decide which pieces of equipment to replace now to save the most money down the line. That type intelligence is something no human or machine could uncover on its own.

Augmented Intelligence will impact industries far beyond telecommunications. Utility CEOs will understand how the entire electric grid will be affected by wholly new inputs, such as the fleets of electric cars that will replace gas-powered ones. By augmenting intelligence, public health officials will be able to plan the best intervention strategy for outbreaks that have never occurred, while defense specialists can identify the best use of first responder resources in the event of a terrorist attack. Any field that requires both human and technology inputs -- or said another way, every field -- will be changed by augmented intelligence when it fulfills the promise inherent in its definition.

We’re at the beginning of an advanced era for artificial intelligence, as the IBM and Salesforce announcement indicates. When we add AI to AI, however, we only get partway toward augmenting intelligence. As technologies are created that truly augment intelligence, such as augmented reality that changes the physical inputs into the brain or neural linking to connect our brains to cloud computing and the internet, we won’t just see better, faster, more efficient mimicry of the human mind.

We’ll have truly, inexorably and intractably augmented intelligence.

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Michel Morvan, PhD and Eisenhower Fellow, is CEO and co-founder of Cosmo Tech, a global technology company that helps the C-suite make optimal decisions. He has worked on complex systems all of his adult life. Michel is a French citizen and a  U.S. resident for the past 2 years. He is dedicated to helping C-level executives, public leaders and others make optimal decisions by creating the tools that allow them to account for the complexity that characterizes the world’s most challenging problems.