Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 25 | Page 52

FEATURE: STAFF RESOURCES AI to become a strategic differentiator. For example, a sales organisation wants to increase the size of its sales force to boost revenue. That expansion would benefit from insights gleaned from HR data (hiring trends and history, training, benefits etc.) and finance data (budgets, local tax implications of opening new offices etc.) and not only from sales data (revenue projections, sales productivity). Enterprise AI would allow organisations to gather, centralise, analyse and act upon that cross-departmental data far more easily. load and health. Enterprise AI at the platform level will allow more people within the company to reuse existing common AI services and also leverage more data streams for machine learning (we know now that deep learning needs enormous data sets; trillions versus billions of data points to become truly effective). Another example; a company’s IT department is stretched to manage networks and servers in its own data centre, as well as manage a cloud provider’s compute capacity for testing and development of new apps and storage on a private cloud platform. Be realistic about AI and Implement an integrated strategy. With the right approach- implementing an enterprise AI strategy that brings together customer data, enterprise data, and structural data through integrated applications, platforms and infrastructure; you can make informed, proactive, game-changing decisions faster than your competition. Enterprise AI can automate provisioning, coming up with suggestions of when to downsize or burst into the cloud by taking into account IoT data on the data centres’ 52 INTELLIGENTCIO While each of the scenarios would work very well even in isolation; imagine how transformative it can be when adopted at an enterprise level. This approach requires partnering with an enterprise AI provider who can help you piece together insights gleaned from structured and unstructured data sets across your entire enterprise, integrating many different silos. Point solutions are a very short term option and will complicate strategic decision making in the future. How can IoT become a valuable resource for those working for an enterprise? Experts predict that data’s importance will only continue to grow. The Internet of Things (IoT) will connect 6.4 billion devices worldwide in 2016 and exceed 20 billion intelligent, connected things by 2020, according to Gartner Inc. These devices are generating more and more data. Software is being embedded in more and more products, from automobiles to televisions to prescription medications, and they’re all generating data. This scenario creates opportunities to analyse data and that data analysis creates value. n www.intelligentcio.com