Artificial Intelligence Is Stuck In A Narrow Rut

With the endless promotion of artificial intelligence by analysts, media, and vendors, one can be forgiven for assuming AI is proliferating across and running enterprises far and wide. However, the reality is beyond simply automating narrow applications — such as credit scoring, upselling recommendations, chatbots, or managing machine performance — AI still has a limited range, and barely begun to achieve its full potential as a true augment to human intelligence and talent.

That’s the takeaway from recent panel discussion hosted by New York University Center for the Future of Management and LMU institute for Strategy, Technology and Organization, joined by Daron Acemoglu, professor at MIT; Jacques Bughin, professor at the Solvay School of Economics and Management; and Raffaella Sadun, professor at Harvard Business School.

“I am not that excited about the narrow applications of AI,” says Sadun. “I’m not excited about the dumb approach of automating one process and them claiming that you are on a different tier of technology.”

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