With businesses facing unprecedented uncertainty, some companies have turned to AI looking for “an answer.” But these businesses are already on the wrong track – ¬any AI that produces a single answer for how to navigate the months ahead is bound to be wrong. The fact is, business assumptions and expectations are changing so fast that any answer AI comes up with will soon be invalid.
Businesses can’t confidently settle on a single strategy because traditional business tools are for now essentially useless. Business intelligence tools used to be a great way to uncover hidden patterns in existing data in order to map out strategy. But BI is backward-looking, and in the current environment, the past looks nothing like the present, and will look even less like the future. Traditional AI relies on data alone, but everyone’s data is now woefully out of date. Quarterly planning is no help either, because it’s impossible to predict what will happen next month, much less next quarter.
Businesses need to let go of the natural impulse to find an answer and focus instead on having the flexibility to change provisional answers very quickly as new information surfaces. The best way to navigate the current uncertainty is to have a series of flexible responses that adapt quickly to changing circumstances.
That’s especially true for AI. Traditional AI is built on the belief that advanced mathematics and data science can produce finely-tuned predictions that accurately forecast the future. But turbulent times demand a very different approach.
What’s important now is how flexible the AI is and how quickly you can change the AI to give better answers given new information. How many levers of flexibility are there in the AI? How broad is that flexibility – does it go from the beginning of the AI process to the end and back again? The more friction points and manual steps there are in the process, the less flexible the AI is. The fewer inputs it considers, the more rigid it is. The more expertise that’s needed to translate the inputs into outputs, the less adaptive it is.
Aible is built from the ground up to be flexible. Flexibility isn’t an add-on feature of Aible – it’s baked into the platform. Aible ensures maximum user flexibility in three important ways:
Unlike traditional AI, this built-in flexibility makes Aible particularly well-suited to help businesses navigate uncertain times. Traditional AI requires a lot of manual consulting and expertise for every one of the above steps, and can’t take feedback at scale. Conventional AI is a top-down process in which a handful of experts create an AI model and the rest of the business passively consumes it, rather than continuously collaborating and adjusting.
Businesses can’t afford AI that inflexibly produces a single answer rather than a portfolio of models that covers a wide range of possible business realities. In the current environment, today’s answer may be obsolete next week. Aible empowers businesses to adjust quickly to change – and the only thing businesses can count on for the foreseeable future is change.