Artificial intelligence will be driving the industry revolution beyond just IT.
This blog post is the first in a three-part series that will explore: 1.) The advancements that AI has made within the past few years, 2.) The significance of AI in the sales domain, and 3.) The future of AI for sales. Ultimately, we'll dig to uncover and put a spotlight on the impact that AI will have on the sales workforce. Will you and your sales team be ready for the AI industrial revolution?
A Recap of AI Advancements
The past few years have witnessed quite a stride for artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning. The biggest surprise is no doubt the historical wins of AlphaGo, a machine powered by AI and deep learning, over a prestigious professional Go world champion. If you are brave and lucky enough, you can also test self-driving Ubers at Pittsburgh or San Francisco. Meanwhile, human-level performance was achieved by AI in conversational speech recognition and computer vision.
2016: The Chatbot Year
2016 has also been deemed the year of the chatbot partly thanks to the advancement of AI and deep learning being applied to natural language processing, with Slack, Microsoft, and Facebook pivoting towards building intelligent bots over messengers, not to mention tons of companies building smart chatbots for all kinds of domains including sales, marketing, shopping, recruiting, etc.
Some of the Big Players in AI
All major companies are pouring resources into AI research; for example, Google open sourced TensorFlow, Microsoft CNTK, Baidu PaddlePaddle, AWS MXNet, Facebook supporting both caffe and Torch, Nvidia providing GPUs and toolkits optimized for deep learning. With these and more amazing advancements lowering barriers to apply cutting-edge AI techniques, AI will be driving the industry revolution beyond just IT, just like steam engine powering the first industrial revolution in the late 18th century, electricity, and assembly lines enabling mass production in the second industrial revolution in the late 19th century, communication/internet, new forms of energy transforming our society in the 20th century.
What's Next for AI and the Sales Domain
Now that we've journeyed through some of the recent advancements in AI, you may be wondering, what does this have to do with sales? What is the relationship between AI and the sales domain? In my next blog post, we'll continue the conversation about AI and dive deeper into how this innovative technology can help accelerate sales.