Chatbots for customer service will help businesses save $8 billion per year – Watson

A new study released this week estimates that that chatbots will help businesses save more than $8 billion per year by 2022, which is a huge increase from the $20 million estimated for this year. In 2022, the success rate of bot interactions in healthcare sector will increase from the current 12% to over 75%, and in the banking sector this will climb to 90%.

Source: Chatbots for customer service will help businesses save $8 billion per year – Watson

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How artificial intelligence can deliver real value to companies | McKinsey & Company

… early evidence suggests that there is a business case to be made, and that AI can deliver real value to companies willing to use it across operations and within their core functions. In our survey, early AI adopters that combine strong digital capability with proactive strategies have higher profit margins and expect the performance gap with other firms to widen in the next three years.

Significant gains are there for the taking. For many companies, this means accelerating the digital-transformation journey. AI is not going to allow companies to leapfrog getting the digital basics right. They will have to get the right digital assets and skills in place to be able to effectively deploy AI.

Source: How artificial intelligence can deliver real value to companies | McKinsey & Company

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Big law is having its Uber moment – Macleans.ca

AI-powered tools are potentially more accurate. Whether they realize it or not, even the sharpest lawyers inevitably bring their own biases to legal research. That, in turn, skews their ability to realistically gauge their chances before judges, who harbour their own preconceived notions of how law should be applied. Tax Foresight, by contrast, isn’t concerned with how a judge should rule, but rather what’s the most likely outcome based on past experience. It’s essentially Moneyball for tax lawyers.

Source: Big law is having its Uber moment – Macleans.ca

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The First Wave of Corporate AI Is Doomed to Fail

Artificial intelligence is a hot topic right now. Driven by a fear of losing out, companies in many industries have announced AI-focused initiatives. Unfortunately, most of these efforts will fail. They will fail not because AI is all hype, but because companies are approaching AI-driven innovation incorrectly. And this isn’t the first time companies have made this kind of mistake.

We suggest taking a portfolio approach to AI projects: a mix of projects that might generate quick wins and long-term projects focused on transforming end-to-end workflow.

There is little doubt that an AI frenzy is starting to bubble up. We believe AI will indeed transform industries. But the companies that will succeed with AI are the ones that focus on creating organizational learning and changing organizational DNA. And the ones that embrace a portfolio approach rather than concentrating their efforts on that one big win will be best positioned to harness the transformative power of artificial learning.

Source: The First Wave of Corporate AI Is Doomed to Fail

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Artificial Intelligence & Traditional Law Firms

Matthew Peters, National Innovation Leader at McCarthy Tétrault

“People don’t have to worry,” says Khalid Al-Kofahi, vice-president, R&D at the Thomson Reuters Centre for Cognitive Computing, a new technology centre that will focus on research in machine perception, reasoning, knowledge management and human-computer interfaces. “Most of the innovations in artificial intelligence and machine learning will introduce automation at the task level, which will allow people to focus on more complex tasks.”

All of this does not bode well for traditional law firms. A recent global research study by Deloitte concluded that conventional law firms are no longer meeting today’s business needs. The majority (55 per cent) of participants in the study — legal counsel, CEOs and CFOs — have taken or are considering a significant review of their legal suppliers. The study also points out that purchasers of legal services want better and more relevant technologies, to be used and shared on integrated platforms.

The drive toward AI, however incrementally, will likely also mean that law firms are going to have to review their traditional billing model, says Furlong. The time when law firms were the only game in town, where lawyers were the “only vehicle” by which legal services could be delivered, is coming to a close, and AI is going to help to put that to an end, he says. “All of these innovations like artificial intelligence are going to reduce the amount of time and amount of effort required to obtain a legal outcome, so the very lax business model of selling time and expertise, rather than outcomes and results, is coming to an end.”

Source: Artificial intelligence | Canadian Lawyer

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IBM Watson to offer artificial-intelligence software to Mass. physician group – Boston Business Journal

IBM Watson Health will develop software using Watson’s cognitive computing capabilities that can provide a more holistic view of a patient’s health, including summarizing key aspects of a patient’s medical history in an easier-to-use format, incorporating social aspects of a person’s health into the electronic medical record and coalescing de-identified information on similar patients and their outcomes to draw broader insights on a certain treatment strategy.

Source: IBM Watson to offer artificial-intelligence software to Mass. physician group – Boston Business Journal

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IBM Watson Health: Cognitive healthcare outthinks data overload

A single patient’s electronic medical record (EMR) may contain over 100MB of complex and disparate data, and much of it is unstructured, such as text notes. That’s a lot to go through in one doctor’s visit. As part of IBM’s research with Cleveland Clinic, clinicians are working with Watson to explore how to navigate and process EMRs to unlock hidden insights within the data, with the goal of helping clinicians make more informed and accurate decisions about patient care. By comparing EMRs, recent diagnostic findings and medical history, and cross-referencing them with thousands of medical journals, Watson can begin to offer clinicians the benefit of more data, more time to plan the best treatments and more time to spend on patient care.

Source: IBM Watson Health: Welcome to the New Era of Cognitive Healthcare

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