Monday, 9 april 2018 | Redacción CEU
The traditional economic way of thinking is left behind. The collaborative economy phenomenon and the unstoppable development of new technologies are overshadowing the products and services offered in this context due to their transforming and innovative character. The financial environment is being impacted by different disruptive advances like blockchain technology, the Internet of Things, Big Data or cloud computing. But, perhaps one of the vital trends of this midway of change is Artificial Intelligence that promises not only to transform the world of finance, but also our society.
Artificial Intelligence -also known by its acronym AI-, like the rest of contemporaneous technological advances, opens the door to new opportunities and welcomes alternatives that challenge or move away from traditional business models. However, if AI stands out among the rest of the transforming agents, it is because its complete development would involve the transfer to the “robots” of decisive tasks associated with the human intellectual capacity and leave important financial decisions in their “hands”. This fact would be crucial in our society, not only would transform certain areas of the financial system, but, as times goes by, it could completely change the global socioeconomic environment.
The revolution of Artificial Intelligence
We are therefore at a turning point. In the article The Business of Artificial Intelligence by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the authors describe Artificial Intelligence and, in particular, Machine Learning as the most important general purpose technology of our era. But why is AI so crucial to our society? Us, human beings are not able to explain how we are capable of doing certain mental processes. Thanks to the development of Artificial Intelligence, we are now able to build systems that learn with the knowledge through patterns to do tasks on their own and also to automate them. And not only that, they are capable of doing it with a very high performance in many areas. In some cases, they are even capable of making decisions without human intervention -Deep Learning-.
This environment where we live characterized by continuous change, the technological advances convergence, the digital transformation and the new challenges that they set out, requires a progressive professional specialization. The ground is increasingly complex. If they do not have a meticulous, detailed and technical knowledge of the space where they work on and are not able to process the amount of information they get, they will not be able to take advantage of the arising opportunities or to keep up with progress. It is precisely the Artificial Intelligence development what contributes to that these experts' mission is not a lost battle in advance, because some tasks that require an extensive dedication go from hours to seconds with its help.
The AI improves practically all the advances of its contemporaries, but the technology that it completes and complements the most is Big Data. Its mission is built on the data processing in large quantities and, in its development, this technology is able to give these data an important added value. Thanks to Big Data, we have a colossal data warehouse, but in order to serve us, we need to know how to interpret them. Artificial Intelligence offers an unprecedented processing capacity that can imitate human intellectual capacity, making it possible to shape that large amount of information