AI FOMO - The Fear of Missing Out
The many benefits being realized by early adopters has caused latecomers to the game to experience AI FOMO. For example, a lot of money is being saved with loss and fraud prediction in insurance and banking. When dozens of global companies adopted the Amelia AI-based digital assistant technology, 24/7 customer service became easy to deliver while front-line layoffs paid for the technology. Here’s an update and our advice.
AI Is…?

AI can mean different things to different people as it’s an umbrella term, defined by Merriam-Webster as the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior. A given application may present as:
- Process automation incorporating automated “learning” feedback to improve the process
- Image processing to recognize a person or identify an activity
- Human language processing, including emotional tone evaluation, to interpret input, then to generate a realistic and appropriate response.
- Risk assessment and mitigation such as bank fraud prediction
- Self-driving cars
Obstacles to AI
To many people, the most difficult part developing an AI strategy is to imagine the range of possibilities, then decide what might make sense for their organization. It’s easy to get stuck before beginning because:
- It’s too expensive – we’re not a mega-corporation, where a tiny improvement in productivity saves millions of dollars.
- It’s too difficult – we don’t have the
expertise for AI. Addressing Obstacles
It’s Too Expensive: You don’t actually know the costs until you investigate and put together some business cases. Remember, everything has a cost, including inaction.
It’s Too Difficult: This is a valid concern. Many organizations don’t have expertise when they decide to develop an AI strategy but they solve the problem by engaging consultants and/or hiring AI specialists.
Where to Start
- Establish a steering group
- Educate yourselves
- Check out what others are doing
- Brainstorm/visualize
- Define what useful functions could be delivered by potential projects
- Identify what is lacking for the delivery of these projects – most often this involves data problems
Data Problems
Many organizations are tackling the mass of problems associated with their data:
- What do we have?
- Where is it? Can we overcome silo problems?
- Of all of the duplications and versions, which version is the truth?
- What data is more important (and therefore needs more protection)
The End Game
I believe the major wins with AI will be in empowering humans to use their precious creativity and brainpower to do work that needs creativity and brainpower. Let the AI do the grunt- work – the research, the detail checking, the repetitive stuff. We’re heading for a brave new world, in a good sense of the term.
If you’d like to comment on this article or explore these ideas further, contact me at ellen.
This article was published in the
November 2020
edition of The TMC Advisor
- ISSN 2369-663X Volume:7 Issue:8
©2020 TMC Consulting