AI Articles and Analysis about Data management

This week we interview a leader at Facebook. Jason Sundram is the lead of World.ai at Facebook, which is one of their efforts to work with public data around roads and population and other projects of that kind. But Sundram is also highly involved in the Boston office here, where Facebook will soon have around 650 employees. Many of them focus on data science and artificial intelligence.

Militaries around the world are starting to make increasing investments in artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities. The top military defense contractors in the US, Europe, and Israel are all working on AI software to sell into the defense sector. That said, the military adoption of AI is as of right now slow in comparison to that of contractors.

The insurance sector is highly competitive, and there seems to be a consensus among experts that customers in the industry favor insurance products that are tailored to their unique needs. Large insurance firms could deliver personalized customer experiences and improve their operational efficiency by adopting AI.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) has significantly changed the landscape for how healthcare providers can be reimbursed by insurers. They are now reimbursed based on the guidelines set by Value-based Purchasing (VBP) models. This type of payment model reimburses the healthcare provider based on the quality of their work with the insured patient.

The healthcare industry is perhaps second only to finance when it comes to the sheer amount of historical data available for use with artificial intelligence. Data from EMRs, insurance claims, clinical trials, and drug research and development can all be pulled into a machine learning algorithm to generate insights on patient behavior, patient risk, and effective treatments for a variety of conditions, among a variety of others.

Sensors and mobile devices are in many ways working with AI software for business intelligence purposes in a few industries, including insurance and oil and gas. In the healthcare space, mobile devices and wearables allow patients to receive information on possible diagnoses for their symptoms and to monitor metrics such as their heart rate.

Episode Summary: Artificial intelligence plays a role in the future of retail in terms of a deeper understanding of customers going beyond intuition. This week, we speak with Pedro Alves, CEO of a company called Ople, based in San Francisco. Alves was previously the Head of Data Science at a number of companies in addition to being Director of Data Science at Sentient Technologies, one of the best known AI firms in the Bay Area. Sentient has raised upwards of $200 million.

We talk a lot about the concept of connective tissue here at Emerj, the fact that a company that wants to apply AI not only needs to have access to data, not only needs to hire normally very expensive artificial intelligence talent, but also has to have the connective tissue of related subject-matter experts who can work with that talent.