Intuitive AI: Making AI Work for You
It’s only taken a few short years for artificial intelligence (AI) to make the leap from the cutting-edge to an integral part of our lives. Whether we’re using ChatGPT to hammer out emails or relying on Netflix and Amazon’s recommendation engines to line up our next binge-watch, more and more of us interact with the technology daily.
As powerful as it is, however, our current uses of AI are relatively limited and require skills and experience for the business world to deploy it effectively. A new category of AI called “intuitive AI” aims to eliminate these limitations by making AI even more natural and human-like, with the ultimate goal being a system so easy to use that any organization can leverage it to develop better business processes and operate more efficiently.
Intuitive AI — it just works
Before going any further, it’s important to explore what differentiates intuitive AI from the more conventional technology so many of us interact with daily.
The most fundamental factor is that intuitive AI is designed to behave more naturally like a human and less like a computer. It does this by mimicking human cognition and behavior through machine learning techniques like deep neural networks. While traditional rule-based AI relies on rigid programmed instructions, intuitive AI takes a different approach:
Natural Language Processing (NLP) – NLP algorithms allow intuitive AI systems to analyze, understand, and generate human-like language. This enables natural conversational interfaces.
Emotional Intelligence – Systems can infer human intention and contextual cues in text. Allows an AI to respond empathetically and recognize if a document has a positive, negative, or neutral sentiment.
Common Sense Reasoning – Through deep learning on vast datasets, AI models can gain a basic understanding of the everyday world that humans acquire as common sense. This helps AI better contextualize information and situations.
Self-Supervised Learning – Enables systems to learn from unlabeled data by identifying inherent structures and relationships within it, reducing reliance on manually labeled data.
Reinforcement Learning – AI agents learn through trial-and-error interactions with an environment, maximizing rewards and minimizing penalties.
By combining strengths across NLP, generative modeling, and neural networks, today’s intuitive AI systems aim to understand the world more like we do as humans. This allows intuitive systems to better understand natural language, emulate emotional intelligence, apply common sense, and learn new skills with less explicitly labeled data. The result is AI that is smarter and far more accessible.
So, why do businesses need this? The biggest draw of intuitive AI is that it just works – a factor that delivers several major benefits.
The benefits of intuitive AI
Seamless user experiences. Think about your smartphone. Did you need to read a manual to work out how to open an app or sit through an instructional video before you sent an email? No. It was intuitive. It’s as if the phone already knows what you are trying to accomplish before you try to do it.
Intuitive AI can apply these same principles to enhance user experiences. Conventional business software often suffers from clunky interfaces and counterintuitive workflows that frustrate users and suppress productivity. A well-implemented intuitive AI tool removes these pain points by enabling natural interactions using plain language conversations and anticipating intentions to proactively provide relevant suggestions, information or documents.
Now, shift to a business context such as an insurance claims app. Today the user likely needs to log in, navigate complex menus, search for the right form, and manually fill in fields. An intuitive AI system would allow users to type in something like “file a claim for a broken window” and have the system ask clarifying questions while completing the claim automatically. The same principles apply for internal tools like HR portals, inventory databases, and other business systems.
Making the most of enterprise data. Today’s organizations are data-rich but insight-poor, with critical information remaining trapped in siloed systems and unstructured formats like emails, chats, papers, and audio files. Trying to apply any kind of manual analysis at this kind of scale is impractical. Intuitive AI, however, can ingest huge volumes of unstructured data, identify relationships invisible to humans, and generate intelligent summaries, sentiment analysis, recommendations, and forecasts.
Imagine introducing a new document to your system. Rather than needing manual tagging or predefined extraction rules, an intuitive AI looks at the file and instantly recognizes it’s an invoice, pulls out the supplier, order details, the amount due, etc.
While it’s true that we’ve had technology capable of doing parts of this for a while, intuitive AI takes it to the next level, delivering comprehensive, automatic processing. It doesn’t need you to define document types or tell it what to look for. The machine already knows.
The democratization of (intuitive) AI. Previously, capitalizing on AI required specialized data scientists and months of arduous training. Intuitive systems greatly expand access with pre-trained AI models, user-friendly interfaces and less need for labeled training data. This democratization makes AI-driven insights and automation feasible for companies of all sizes. The intuitive AI revolution could have as profound an impact on business competitiveness as the spread of computers and internet connectivity.
Business users can rapidly configure intuitive AI software without the need for any coding skills. For example, a purchasing manager could set up an intelligent document processing system to extract key details from invoices, purchase orders, and contracts, while employees could access AI via natural language conversations. With the barriers to entry removed, companies across industries can infuse AI into their business processes, no matter how large they are or how many resources they can access.
Fading into the background. When intuitive AI systems fade into the background of workflows, employees can focus their attention on higher-value tasks that create greater impact. For example, an intuitive AI virtual assistant could handle routine customer service queries, processing payments, scheduling appointments, or providing highly accurate summaries of lengthy documents. This frees up employees to spend time building rapport with customers, providing consultative advice, and resolving complex issues.
Intuitive AIs act as digital collaborators, automating the mundane so that human workers can apply their judgment, creativity, and emotional intelligence to more strategic priorities. The technology handles predictable grunt work while employees work on novel challenges. By seamlessly taking on the routine aspects of various jobs, Intuitive AI liberates human talent to unlock their full potential.
Intuitive AI in practice: analyzing legal documents
So far, we have been speaking in hypotheticals, but real-world examples like an AI-enabled ECM platform showcase the power of intuitive AI to deliver impressive results.
Such a platform can quickly process legal paperwork without needing extensive training or manual programming. As soon as the document – even if it’s a slightly imperfect scan – enters the system, the intuitive AI gets to work. Without the need for any instructions, it seamlessly identifies the document type, extracting key details like names and dates, and even summarizing the content.
The system exhibits human-like reading comprehension without rigid rule-based coding. For example, to identify the document type, the AI doesn’t just match keywords. It understands context and legal terminology at a deeper level, recognizing nuances that differentiate a “contract” from a “work order.”
The natural language processing contextualizes each file like a company employee would. The AI wasn’t explicitly trained on the client’s unique document types or tailored by engineers. It deduced how to extract useful information through deep learning neural networks that mimic human reasoning.
The end result is an intelligent platform that can ingest and process volumes of lengthy paperwork, without needing document-specific configurations. It automatically structures unstructured data at scale. The system works intuitively right out of the box rather than relying on inflexible rules. This showcases how intuitive AI can tackle real business challenges to efficiently turn raw data into actionable insights.
AI of the future
It’s easy to look at the benefits of intuitive AI and classify them as simple quality-of-life improvements – something that’s nice to have but doesn’t deliver much in the way of tangible value. As anyone who’s spent any substantial time in a working office will know, however, the countless small improvements, time-saves, and ease-of-use changes enabled by intuitive AI can quickly snowball.
Technology so smooth that it fades into the background is a genuine game-changer. It allows users to tap into incredible capabilities without realizing the complexity behind the scenes, opening up huge potential across industries to smoothly transform workflows for employees and customer experiences.
Most organizations have a wealth of insights trapped in documents and data. Intuitive AI is the ultimate tool to extract value from this underused information. The AI revolution has only just begun, with the shift to Intuitive AI marking the next leap forward.
Bart Peluso is Vice President, Marketing at KnowledgeLake.
