Last Thursday the 14th of March 2019 I had the pleasure to join the AI 4 Business Summit 2019 in Brussels, a yearly event that introduces business professionals to the power of AI. The event opened with two inspirational talks by data evangelists Patrick Andersen and Mathias Vercauteren. They demystified AI for the audience and explained what AI can do for you and why you should start with AI rather today than tomorrow.
Dr. Roeland Dietvorst closed the morning by a wonderful blend of behavioral neuroscience and AI. First, he shared to the audience some insights developed by Noble Prize winners Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler on how our brain misleads us when we make judgements, leading to irrational decision-making. Second, Roeland showed how AI can exploit the way we make judgements to create optimal marketing strategies and advertisements.
The afternoon was filled with a multitude of break-out sessions on AI topics such as NLP, chatbots, voice marketing, automating AI, UX with AI, legal and ethical aspects of AI,…and many more. Personally, I liked the presentation by Damien D’Ostuni on voice marketing. Damien showed how virtual assistants like Alexa and Cortana will lead firms to reconsider how they are searched on the web and how firms will need to create a brand identity which is not only focused on vision but also on sound.
Johan Loeckx, assistant professor in AI from the renowned AI Lab at the VUB, shared some closing thoughts with the audience. He introduced us how AI started soon after World War II by Claude Shannon (inventor of the Information Theory and much more, on youtube, search: “Claude Shannon theseus”). Later on, he explained how each wave of AI breakthroughs changed the way business is being done, from the rule-based systems such as the early chess computer Deep Blue that defeated chess champion Garry Kasparov, over how search has changed the internet (Google) up until the current breakthroughs of deep learning and reinforcement learning.
A very nice closing to an inspiring day!
-Robrecht