M&E Journal, US: Cognizant’s Vice President, AI & Analytics Discusses the Fourth Industrial Revolution

“What if insights begin with humanism, empathizing with and designing things for real people? What if things were designed to place human experience at the center of the art-of-possible?” writes Arun Varadarajan. “Once these deep-rooted, nuanced, cultural and historical contexts are well understood, techniques such as big-data and AI/ML (machine learning) algorithms can be used to observe and respond to human needs.” Excerpts:

“As we dive headlong into a world dominated by artificial intelligence (AI), questions on the readiness of businesses and society to adopt machine thinking remain unanswered. With the advent of big data technologies, organizations have better access to a wide variety and volume of data than ever before. The key question is whether they have the data they need to solve real-world problems.

Big data technologies nicely capture real-world data, but due to a lack of context (i.e., situational awareness) they occasionally fail to provide real insights. Why is context important? Well, some of the biggest problems the businesses want to solve are based on human behaviors – and our understanding of them.

By scrutinizing design thinking and using social science, businesses can get a deeper understanding of how to model the world better in this context. Social scrutiny is accomplished by conducting deep immersive psychographic and ethnographic research where anthropological techniques are applied to study human behavior in a given circumstance.

There is much to ponder and much to debate, and this is just one key element that businesses must examine in greater detail before AI runs amok."

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