In this Acceleration Economy Digital CIO Summit Moment, excerpted from the “Generative AI and the Future” session, “Intelligent Automation” co-author Ian Barkin tells John Siefert why some of the misunderstandings and conflation around intelligent automation and early forms of artificial intelligence (AI) got in the way of real progress and digital transformation. However, generative AI’s clearly impressive capabilities and relative user-friendliness are making it easier for organizations to invest and experiment with new technology.
Highlights
00:05 — Ian says that in the past, when he would educate clients or prospective clients on how to use software that could emulate the work that people do for routine, mundane, transactional, and rule-based work — robotic process automation (RPA) — he would often get frustrated with the typical response he received: “What do I need RPA if I can just use AI?”
00:25 — “I wanted to say ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ — but with spicier words, because they didn’t know, and I didn’t know, and they had been fed marketing BS,” he says. “It was frustrating because it literally got in the way of valuable continuous improvement, process reengineering, transformation, and digitization discussions that we could have if they didn’t just put their faith and hope in the hype.”
00:56 — Ian says he saw this happen in large enterprises, where, arguably, there should be investments in what’s coming down the pipeline and tinker with it, but that intense amounts of money and time were spent trying to make earlier iterations of AI work, and they didn’t end well.
01:21 — But now, with generative AI, “the capabilities that it has are really thrilling,” Ian says.
