Superhuman Innovation

Superhuman Innovation:  Transforming Businesses with Artificial Intelligence, by Chris Duffey, KoganPage, 2019 

When MIT's Stephen Wolfram talked AI (Artificial Intelligence) he was too early with a powerful concept  that had few practical applications.  Now, two decades later Wolfram has achieved hero status for his early work.  We know now how AI is re-shaping the way humans communicate - what information they need, and who, according to the analytics, will see it.  AI offers us revolutionary approaches to manufacturing and customer identity as we build and rebuild powerful networks.  It's breath taking.

But we humans are in need of closer communication and some basics to understand the possibilities.  We may not remember how electricity changed our world, but we do recall when the automobile became a life staple, and when, in some areas, the death of trains converted us to 24/7 commuter slaves.  Glorious and ugly possibilities abound.

Fortunately technology visionary Chris Duffey, head of AI Innovation and Strategy at Adobe, shines a bright light on the pathways and distant goals we can barely make out ahead.  "Customers and consumers are not interested in the technicalities of AI.  They want to know what it can achieve and how AI technology can serve people and businesses.  That's what Superhuman Innovation is about."

Duffey and his co-author, digital assistant Aime,  recommend that we construct an AI road map on which a viable strategy can be built, one that encompasses:

    *  speed

    *  understanding

    *  performance

    *  experimentation

    *  results

Aime was constructed to identify, understand and respond to keywords, phrases, ideas and requests, much like Amazon's Alexa and Apple's Siri, only she is Duffey's personal digital partner!  If you think of what a digital slave - or partner - can handle in terms of amounts of data and speed of search, you are seeing the possibilities of matured AI.  Retail companies, for example, can derive customer preferences and product needs just from digesting large fields of seemingly unrelated data.  And they can, despite human dissembling, discover true human likes and needs.  "Human ingenuity together with AI will bring about innovation across energy, fashion, finance, pharmaceuticals, recruiting, retail, advertising, art, automotive, aviation, banking, energy, security and sports," warns Duffey.

As a construct of three systems:  AI Voice Recognition, AI Content Understanding and Summarization, and AI Content Creation and Generation, Aime demonstrates through Duffey's book how simple AI systems can be driven to produce a tangible result - this book!  The book does not read like a deep dive into coding, however; the beauty of the book's structure and language is that her input becomes transparent!

Patricia E. Moody

FORTUNE magazine  "Pioneering Woman in Mfg" 

IndustryWeek IdeaXchange Xpert

A Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, on-line resource for business thought-leaders and decision-makers, pemoody@aol.com, patriciaemoody@gmail.com, tricia@patriciaemoody.com,