The past 25 years have been marked, among other things, by the significant development of Internet use, but also by the spectacular fall in the cost of information storage. A disc of 1 terabit (TB) which was worth $10 million in the early ‘90s is worth under $80 from any big box retailer! These two trends running on parallel tracks has led to a race to collect data. Software publishers have provided solutions to manage the large volumes of data found in ERP, CRM, and decision-making support tools designed to streamline decisions based on data, not the intuition of a sometimes misguided decision maker. George A Miller was the first to point out the weakness of the human brain in instant decision-making. He demonstrated, about sixty years ago (“The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two”) that human beings could only make a logical and immediate decision by relying on a maximum of seven data points. Beyond that number, our decision-making is generally intuitive because our brain cannot synthesize the amount of information made available by computer tools. The more a company stores large amounts of data, for example customer data, the more it confuses the employee in charge of interviewing these same customers. This is a really scary fact, and calls into question this mad rush for data collection! A decision made intuitively is not necessarily a bad decision, but it is better, at the same time, to validate one’s intuition with logical reasoning. And here is where artificial intelligence is gradually changing our professional and personal lives. Without artificial intelligence that knows how to reason on a large amount of data, and that complements CRM and other data management solutions, the collection of a large amount of data is underperforming for the company, whatever its size. Let’s focus on the quality of the data collected, not the quantity.
In our book, “The Rise of the Cobot”, available on Amazon, we objectively describe the other three major structural changes that explain why AI is becoming essential for businesses, SMEs included.