Unleashing Human Potential

The Future of AI in Business

Introduction – Unleashing Human Potential – The Future of AI in Business

The pace of investment in and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in business is accelerating and the level of interest and activity is rising across all sectors. The intention of this new book is to provide a diverse set of perspectives on where the technology is going, how it is being deployed in business today, and how the capabilities, applications, and impact of AI could evolve over the next 3-10 years.

Fast Future Publishing develops our books using an exponential publishing model, and we have completed the successful launch of our first two books – The Future of Business (top five per cent of all business books in its first year), and Technology vs. Humanity (Amazon bestseller within one week of launch).

Scope

The aim is to address the following key topics:

  1. AI as the catalyst of the fourth industrial revolution; providing a paradigm shift comparable to mass production or the Internet, not a phase akin to ‘the cloud’
  2. Outlining how AI capabilities, tools, and technologies could evolve over the next 3-10 years
  3. Being human and the boundary between humans and machines
  4. Exploring the future potential applications across a range of business sectors for the various branches of AI – including machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), natural language processing (NLP), image / voice / speech / video recognition, cognitive computing, and robotics
  5. Evaluating the potential impacts, business benefits, and challenges that could arise
  6. Considering the importance of an organisation’s internal culture to the speed / breadth of AI implementation
  7. Outlining the power of AI to help unlock the true potential of people in the workplace
  8. Assessing the potential of AI to transform, reshape, and even create entire industries and economies
  9. Discussing the possible impacts of AI on employment and how society might respond
  10. Considering the potential legal, moral, and ethical issues that could arise from the acceleration of adoption of AI
  11. Evaluating the perception of AI in some sections of the media as a force for evil and destroyer of jobs.

Examining the Future of AI in Business

Key questions that could be explored as part of that could include:

OVERALL

  1. Why is AI sparking the fourth industrial revolution? What is it about AI that will produce a paradigm shift – not a phase akin to ‘the cloud’ but rather a wholesale change to the way business is done, comparable to mass production or the Internet?

 

ENTERPRISES

Current state of play

  1. What are you currently doing with AI in your business?
  2. Where are some of the biggest corporations, vendors, service providers, and small to medium businesses (SMBs) in their current AI activities?
  3. What is AI achieving for businesses already using the technology? As with past emergent technologies, increased efficiency, productivity, and reduced costs are typical and sensible answers, but more specifically how is this occurring, how can it be measured, what is the ROI?

 

Future

  1. A high percentage of business leaders are planning on implementing AI in their organisation in the next 18 months, but how exactly? What are they looking to achieve, what problems are they trying to solve, with the use of the technology?
  2. Which sectors are / could be embracing and deploying AI to greatest effect on their customers and their business models?
  3. What kind of deployments do you envisage in the coming years?
  4. What different scenarios do you see for the future role of AI across society and business?
  5. Will AI be used by some companies to defend their existing business model, or as a creative disrupter to bring radical change to markets?
  6. Are we at the cusp or a radical overhaul of the business landscape, with new players taking the place of traditional / legacy companies?
  7. Would it be possible for a traditional firm such as Hilton to “do an AirBnB” in its sector using AI as an enabler – what examples might we see?

 

Internal

  1. How important is the internal culture of an organisation to the speed / breadth of AI implementation?
  2. Which job roles are currently the ones pushing / responsible for the progress of AI implementation in corporate enterprises, and what roles (e.g. Chief AI Officer?) will be created as AI becomes a more mainstream (and ultimately essential) technology in businesses?
  3. Could emotional perspectives – loyalty to an established brand, for example – render AI deployment less effective if the technology is prevented from decision making processes and restricted to complex analysis?
  4. What societal opportunities / challenges could emerge from the evolution of AI?
  5. How might we mitigate potential risks and concerns?

 

THE TECHNOLOGY ITSELF

  1. How will AI capabilities / the AI landscape evolve now and in the short-term future (three – ten years)?
  2. Which branches of AI technologies (ML, DL, NLP, image / voice / speech / video recognition, cognitive computing, and robotics) are finding the most useful applications now and in what industry? And which show the greatest and least potential over the next three to ten years?
  3. What barriers might emerge to AI fulfilling its promise?
  4. When do you think we might see something approaching true Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) – how might it manifest itself?

 

Ethics and Society

  1. How should the development of AI in business be regulated – in the realms of ethics, employment, law, and beyond in society as a whole?
  2. What are the biggest risks and concerns with the development of AI in business, and how can these be tackled and mitigated?
  3. There are many definitions of AI – does there need to be one accepted way of thinking about AI to allow business / society to understand its potential, or should we accept that there will always be many ways of thinking about AI?
  4. The portrayal of AI as a destroyer of jobs and force for evil in some sections of the media is difficult to overcome, but the level of acceptance is already greater now than even a year ago. Will the media always present AI in this way to an extent? Is it necessary to address this, or should companies simply continue to go about their business and application of AI, and let their actions speak louder than words?
  5. What role should or could business play in preparing society for the potentially transformational role and impact of AI?

 

Financial and Economic Impact

  1. If stock markets are seeing traditional companies fall out and being replaced by new ones, what could the major markets look like in 10 years?
  2. How may AI-enabled companies be valued in the future and will AI enabling itself become a critical driver of a company’s valuation?
  3. How might investors consider AI enabled businesses compared to the rest?
  4. What is the potential of AI to transform, reshape, and even create industries?
  5. Could AI lead to a fundamental reshaping of entire economies and economic systems?

Fast Future Publishing

Fast Future Publishing develops our books using an exponential publishing model and we have completed the successful launch of our first two books – The Future of Business (top five per cent of all business books in its first year), and Technology vs. Humanity (Amazon bestseller within one week of launch).

We are a new breed of publisher founded by three futurists – Rohit Talwar, Steve Wells, and April Koury. Our goal is to profile the latest thinking of established and emerging futurists, foresight researchers, and future thinkers from around the world, and to make those ideas accessible to the widest possible audience in the shortest possible time. Our FutureScapes book series is designed to address a range of critical agenda setting futures topics that we believe are relevant to individuals, governments, businesses, and civil society. Technology vs. Humanity by futurist Gerd Leonhard is the second book in the series and was published on September 8th 2016.

Our first book, The Future of Business, has shipped over 6,000 copies in its first year, placing it among the top five per cent of non-fiction books worldwide. The book provides 60 fast moving chapters and 566 pages of cutting-edge thinking from 62 future thinkers in 21 different countries on four continents. Traditional publishers would take two years to deliver a book of this magnitude; we completed the journey from idea to publication in just 19 weeks. We have also created an innovative business model that bypasses most of the traditional publishing practices and inefficiencies, embracing digital era exponential thinking and applying it to transform the publishing process, the distribution approach, and the profit-sharing model.

Our publishing model ensures that our authors, core team members, and partners on each book share in its profits. Additionally, a proportion of profits are allocated to a development fund to finance causes related to the core topic. For The Future of Business, the fund will be used to finance scholarships for those wanting to take courses in foresight research and practice. For Technology vs. Humanity, the fund will be targeted at initiatives that seek to further the debate.

For further information, please contact:
Project Manager – Steve Wells: [email protected], or
Series Curator and Co-Editor – Rohit Talwar: [email protected]