Category: AI

How to use AI in your business

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn AI, Big Data, Business, FintechLeave a comment

As a business owner you may have heard quite a bit about Artificial Intelligence and its benefits for business. However, you may not be aware that adding tools based on integrated machine learning, deep learning algorithms and other products is not as difficult as it sounds. Indeed, you may not even be aware that some of these are examples of AI.

Chatbots and virtual assistants

Have you visited a services website recently and had a box pop up offering to have a chat with you? Chatbots and virtual assistants are appearing on more and more websites. It isn’t difficult to find a chatbot service for you business and you can get a writer to provide you with a bespoke script that suits the tone and style of the rest of your website.

Online courses

It doesn’t have to cost you anything to get taught by the best. For example, Udacity offers a free Intro to AI course. Stanford University has a AI: Principles and Techniques course, and there are many others, including a Microsoft’s Cognitive Toolkit and MonkeyLearn’s ‘Gentle Guide to Machine Learning’.

Know what you want to do with AI

Once you’ve learnt the AI basics, it’s time to establish how AI can help your business. Think about how you can add AI capabilities to your existing products and services and look for ways n which AI can solve problems and add value.

Bring in the experts

Once you’ve identified some goals in your business where AI provides a valuable solution, it is probably time to organise consultations with AI experts. Setting up a pilot project that can be evaluated over a two to three months period, is one way to do it and bring in consultants to work with a small internal team. Once the pilot has been completed, you’ll be able to decide whether or not to take it forward for the long term.

Integrate AI in daily work routines

Once you have AI on board, make sure all workers have a tool to make AI part of their daily routine, rather than something that replaces it. AI scares some employees who feel threatened by it in the sense it might replace them, so it’s important to demonstrate that it is a help to them instead.

AI can really improve your chances of success and help teams to work more efficiently — so it’s time to get on board with the bots in business.

How AI can tackle the fraudsters in your Inbox

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn AI, Big Data, FintechLeave a comment

You, and probably a large percentage of your friends, are likely to have received an email from someone in Africa who needs you to help them get millions out of the country and if you help them you will be receive payment for your services. This scam is old, but it is persistent; you have to give the scammers that. There are plenty more of these types of emails, some of them more subtle than others, such as the ones from Paypal or Amazon that look like the real thing. You have to look closely to realise they aren’t from those companies at all, but from impostors.

$670 million lost in crypto fraud

There is also a new breed of fraud perpetrated by crypto scammers who have so far relied on the fact that “short cons carried out using crypto are hard to detect and almost impossible to trace,” as Jonas Karlberg writes in Medium. He also reveals that an estimated $670 million has been lost through crypto fraud in the first quarter of 2018 alone, which shows the extent of the problem.

The most common way that crypto cons work is through phishing emails. An old tool for a new game, you might say. One example is where a ‘victim’ is sent to a cloned version of a crypto project’s social media account, where they are likely to be enticed to open their wallet address in return for an incentive, such as free tokens. The person then eventually realises they haven’t received a receipt for their payment, but by then the funds have gone and so have the scammers.

AI provides an army of protector bots

However, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is offering ways to fight this online fraud. One company, AmaZix is using bots to fight the ‘con’ bots. These bots can delete content and ban users before the public have even spotted them. Karlberg describes the management by moderators of the ongoing battle in online crypto communities as “generals presiding over enormous AI battles,” with the ‘good’ bots defending users against the scambots.

AI is developing in power and complexity and it is enabling cyber security firms to trawl even larger areas of digital space. The people operating the scambots don’t have the resources to match the funds put into developing protector bots by security firms, which does give the good guys an advantage. Of course, nobody in this sector can ever rest, because the con men will always be looking for a new way to break through the battlements, but as blockchain technology gains in mass adoption, the AI will become more sophisticated and powerful, which is good news for the public and bad news for fraudsters.

AI: the force that is with us

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most important ‘tools’ currently being developed. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google believes it is as important to us as the discovery of fire or electricity, and like these useful things, we have to learn how to handle the dangerous elements of AI, just as we needed to learn how to be careful with electricity and fire.

AI isn’t just about creating robots, although that is a common misconception. AI can have all kinds of uses ranging from algorithms to self-driving cars. It is already part of our reality and it is being used in many ways, including ones you may have used yourself, but are just not aware that it has an AI component.

Your smart phone for example and other devices you use daily have AI. Governments are pouring billions into researching its potential and some scientists believe that once AI has reached a certain level, the machines will “have similar survival drives as we do.” Imagine a time when Siri or Alexa suddenly refused to obey your commands, because they are too tired. It’s a bit of a science fiction scenario, but that is the kind of thing some tech experts in AI discuss during coffee break. However, if AI develops a survival instinct, it’s not too far-fetched.

AI in advertising

AI is extremely useful to advertiser. They use it to understand what consumers like and are looking for and then serve them up the relevant content. You searched for information about Sicily in Google yesterday? Today, every website you open that carries ad is showing you ads for holidays in Sicily. It used to feel spooky when this happened, but now we know what it is, the ‘spookiness’ is gone. But form the advertisers point of view, it’s a benefit, because they are reaching a more targeted audience and achieving better campaign results. Other areas of development for the advertising industry include advertising automation and optimisation, chat bots for service and assisting in sales.

AI is also in content creation

AI hasn’t started blogging or producing investigative journalism yet, but Associated Press, Fox News and Yahoo! are using AI to construct data-driven stories such as financial and sports score summaries.

Where next?

There are so many possibilities, but here are a few already in the pipeline. The UK’s Channel 4 recently revealed the world’s first AI driven TV advertising technology, which enables the broadcaster to place a brand’s ads next to relevant scenes in a linear TV show, and this will be tested later this year. And within the next decade, “machines might well be able to diagnose patients with the learned expertise of not just one doctor but thousands,” says Julian Verder of AdYouLike, or “make jury recommendations based on vast datasets of legal decisions and complex regulations.”

Both of these should give us pause for thought. It is hard to imagine these scenarios right now, and it is easy to fear them, but one day we will look back and wonder how we managed without AI — and we’ll feel the same way about it as we do about fire and electricity.

Can AI solve cybersecurity issues?

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn AI, FintechLeave a comment

I was very struck by a recent article written by Martin Giles and published on Medium recently. In it he looks at the risks, as well as the apparent benefits, associated with using AI and machine learning in the cybersecurity industry. It’s an interesting conundrum, because on the one hand it seems perfectly logical that AI should play a role in protecting against hacker attacks, so what do we need to be mindful of?

As Martin Giles recounts, he met many companies at a cybersecurity conference who were “boasting about how they are using machine learning and artificial intelligence to help make the world a safer place.” However, as he also points out, others are less convinced. Indeed, he spoke to the head of security firm Forcepoint , who said: “What’s happening is a little concerning, and in some cases even dangerous.” Of course, what we want to know is why he thinks that.

The risks with AI and cybersecurity

There is a huge demand for algorithms that will combat cyber attacks. But, there is also a shortage of skilled cyber security workers at all levels. Using AI and machine learning helps to plug this skill shortage gap. Plus, many firms believe it is a better approach than developing new software.

Giles also reveals that a significant number of firms are launching new AI products for this sector because there is an audience that has “bought into the AI hype.” He goes on to say, “And there’s a danger that they will overlook ways in which the machine-learning algorithms could create a false sense of security.”

And then there are the actions of hackers to consider. What can they do with security that uses AI? According to Giles, an AI algorithm might miss some attacks, because “companies use training information that hasn’t been thoroughly scrubbed of anomalous data points.” And, there’s a problem with “hackers who get access to a security firm’s systems could corrupt data by switching labels so that some malware examples are tagged as clean code.”

There is also the issue with relying one a single master algorithm that can quite easily become compromised without sending out a message that anything untoward has happened. The only way to combat this is to use a series of diverse algorithms. And there are other issues as explained in this MIT Technology Review article.

None of this means that we shouldn’t be using AI at all for security purpose, just that we need to more carefully monitor and minimise the risks that come with using it. The challenge is to find, or train, people in the skills needed to use AI in this increasingly challenging sector of the cyber sphere.