Artificial vs human intelligence

Facebook reportedly unveiled plans to use artificial intelligence to summarize new articles into bullet points. The technology will be named for the online phrase TLDR (too long, didn’t read) commonly used for quick summaries of long posts.

At LAC Group, we are always looking for tools to help make us faster and more efficient for our clients. We are keenly interested in how AI could be further applied to curation and intelligence summaries and analysis. Despite our interest and testing, however, we have not yet seen an AI or other automated system that can consistently and reliably capture the essence of essential data streams and multiple sources.

To give you an example: an analogous situation is the “sentiment metrics” on social media monitors. They have been around for years, but despite constant attempts to improve them, they are not generally reliable, and even less so when considering sentiment from a specific company’s point of view.

We have found in both our own work and talking to clients an increasing emphasis on human intelligence—supported by robust tools. AI shows potential to empower companies to perform efficiently through completing repetitive, simple and less sophisticated tasks. But the more complex tasks require human intelligence, knowledge, and focus.

When it comes to delivering customized insights and answers to our clients’ most pressing strategic questions, we believe the strongest asset is our team of trained and dedicated analysts. The most basic principle of intelligence is that it must be precisely aligned with an organization’s strategic priorities. We find this can only be met through human intelligence. Our analysts know our clients’ needs and can use a range of technologies to apply what they learn to generate new insights.

TLDR: We want to believe in AI, but we can’t yet advise clients to exclusively utilize this type of tech to support important operational and strategic decisions.