In 2018, it seems like a day barely goes by without someone announcing the opening of a new AI lab (MIT, IBM, Alibaba, Baidu, Intel, Google, Facebook — the list goes on). And yes, this is another one of those announcements… sort of. But here’s why the launch of the Enterprise AI Lab is different.
Automating Away Boredom
Normally when you think AI lab, you might think about robots doing cool stuff (like delivering room service or performing surgery). Which is, well — pretty rad. Yet for the average person, these innovations aren’t exactly life-changing when you think at the day-to-day scale, or at least they won’t be anytime soon.
Now think about Enterprise AI, which is all about improving day-to-day business processes using AI and ultimately freeing up employees for more creative and engaging work. That’s something that has the potential for impact across companies and among people worldwide; imagine if you never again had to do the most repetitive and boring parts of your job.
Still not convinced? Here’s just one example: in its pilot phase, the Enterprise AI Lab worked with an insurance company to automate the processing of physical mail, reducing a full day of manual work to less than an hour and allowing mail handlers to focus on triaging only the most difficult letters. Now that is rad.
Sourcing Real-World Projects
The Enterprise AI Lab, which full disclosure: is sponsored by Dataiku, is also unique because the team (made up of international data scientists, data experts, and AI architects) will take on challenging projects directly from corporations, nonprofits, or academics — large or small — worldwide.
These organizations can contact the Enterprise AI Lab here with a real-life business challenge that they want to address hands-on with the team using data science, machine learning, and automation to improve not only the processes themselves, but the lives and work of the people that execute those processes.
That means the Enterprise AI Lab isn’t so much a lab in the secretive, sterile sense of the word, but rather in the sense of creativity and getting one’s hands dirty. Instead of working in pristine conditions with theories about how things should work, the Enterprise AI Lab will get down in the trenches and solve real problems with scalability and repetitive work that companies grapple with today.
Get in Touch
If you’re intrigued and think you have a complex, challenging, real-world use case for the Enterprise AI Lab, take a gander at the criteria for project selection and submit! There is no deadline; the Enterprise AI Lab will continually evaluate and take on submissions throughout 2018-2019 and beyond.