How AI Will Disrupt The GCC

Managing director of Marmore Mena Intelligence, MR Raghu, looks at which sectors in the region will experience the most disruption from artificial intelligence

KE JIE WAS dumbfounded. He had just been defeated in the ancient Chinese board game of ‘Go’ by ‘AlphaGo’, Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) programme.

‘Go’, he reasoned, was not like other cerebral games such as chess. It had an incomputable (10 to the power of 170) number of move options and also required human instincts like intuition, which was thought to be beyond the reach of artificial intelligence systems like AlphaGo after it regularly lost to even mid-level players. But on that day in May 2017, AI technology had made enough advances to defeat the best player in the game.

This event was hailed as a milestone for artificial intelligence. What was remarkable was that AlphaGo learnt the game by competing against itself without any human intervention. This was a successful attempt at machine learning, which means ‘the science of getting computers to learn or improve performance using just data and no explicit programming’.

This success has given hope that machine learning could be taken further to solve complex human problems too.

While AlphaGo got a lot of publicity, a revolution was already taking place, led by Google, Amazon and Microsoft. They were in a race to create AI platforms that can not only be used by themselves, but third party developers too, which can help other companies deploy their own AI systems.