The closest I’ve seen to anything useful was Watson, and all it really offered was stuff we’ve been doing for years. I mean, we have 5 people working with data and building models, and Watson could maybe automate some of that, but you’d still need people to qualify what it came up with and build the things it didn’t.
We’ve run proof of concepts on stuff like traffic, and a small startup with a relationship with a university, build a route prediction thing that would make it easier to avoid jams. It worked, but it frankly didn’t work better than what our traffic department was already doing, using simple common sense. So we diverted the project to work on traffic light control for maximum flow, and it turned out that the settings our engineers had come up with were already optimal. Only our engineers had come up with the same results, using less resources.
I’m beginning to think of AI as mostly hype. It does have some uses, like for recognition. We use ML and image recognition to troll through millions of old case files for various purposes. We use speech recognition to help people with dyslexia.
But for analytics and prediction it’s been extremely useless compared to actual people.
I’d love to be convinced otherwise by the way. If it actually does something, I’d like to be on the forefront with it so I don’t have to play catch up when Deloitte sells it to the mayor. But I have to admit that after 5 years of AI bullshit bingo I’m one sales meeting away from labeling AI in the same category as blockchain.