Nowadays, terms like Artificial Intelligence and Big Data are trending and commonly used in Marketing. At first glance, it seems positive because most of the companies know or are interested to know more about these technologies. However, if you dig a little bit, there are lots of misunderstandings and failure projects that are also a threat for companies to invest on this kind of innovative projects.
Both terms, Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, are commonly used as a magic solution for any complex problem. However, the use of these techniques and tools is not magic and requires a lot of knowledge and understanding of the problem to provide value.
En primer lugar, es importante definir de forma sencilla cada uno de los términos, ya que en muchas ocasiones se confunden o se utilizan para identificar únicamente un subconjunto de estas tecnologías.
Big Data is a set of tools and techniques that allow to process and interact with huge amounts of data. In short, it provides similar capabilities than traditional databases in order to deal with bigger amounts of data.
Artificial Intelligence is more complex to define because it is composed of multiple and diverse fields, but all of them have in common that imply machines to mimic cognitive functions from humans as perception, reasoning, learning and solving problems. It is quite common to make the assumption that Artificial Intelligence is just related to robots or machine learning, but these are just some areas of Artificial Intelligence. The evolution of computers capabilities to perform calculations and process information has allowed traditional and new algorithms to be applied to multiple fields that in the past were impossible to imagine. Many of this techniques were used by mathematicians offline and that was reserved only for big corporations. Artificial Intelligence is, somehow, the democratization of these techniques.
Although these technologies are really accessible due to the proliferation of companies and frameworks around them, it does not mean that anything can be solved or that are simple and easy to use. With lower barriers, many companies have seen the opportunity to sell complex projects that would be solved by Artificial Intelligence and Big Data on their own, but not taking into account something really important: not everything can be solved using them and using a tool does not give you the knowledge to model data and use the correct algorithms.
Project failures and the hype created around these terms are slowly destroying the reputation of Artificial Intelligence and many companies and engineers are becoming sceptic when these terms are proposed as the solution to any problem.
Will it arrive the day that companies hide that use Artificial Intelligence or Big Data in order to solve real problems but will hide it because it could cause a negative effect in their marketing strategy?
Co-Founder & CEO at Hedyla
Telecommunications Engineer with more than 10 years experience managing development teams and the B2B market, adding value to big corporates from different industries like Fintech, Travel and Logistics.
Expert in analysis and data visualization.
