That sounds like truly valuable ERP, and largely devoid of AI.
Yes. That was kinda my point. Most of the time, it is just a good piece of software, not an 'AI'. In fact, for most situations you do not want an AI, because you want to the software to behave predictably.
My point being is: good software has been replacing need for humans to manage processes for a long time now.
As soon as we really understand how it works, we no longer call it AI. (And it becomes predictable).
"AI" is to "Computer Science" what "Magic" is to "Science".
I say this because it seems pretty obvious that software can improve the productivity of employees (including managers). But what the blog post at the top says is that AI will replace managers as a category of employees—a much stronger claim.
But that is not what happened in the story I responded to. The manager still had tasks exclusive to them (dealing with young employees and angry customers) that had not been automated away.
> Basically the only reason why there still was a manager was for responsibility and babysitting (most employees were teens that did dumb stuff). And the occasional Karen who wanted to talk to a manager.
Perhaps devoid of machine learning, given the year, but even that seems unlikely if the anecdote is true.
If predicting and planning outcomes and with previous data is not some form of AI, what is?
Agreed on the valuable ERP thing, though. There’s a reason SAP is as expensive as it is.
Algorithmic forecasting.
If you squint really hard, the entirety of computer science falls under "AI". But practically speaking, today AI refers to ML.
It's quite possible a savvy programmer integrated the weather forecast to the ERP, with specific products tagged as relevant to a sunny (or wet) outlook. That's not AI, that's just an algo.
It's also possible there was ML at play, but that's not clear, and not necessarily the case.
AI is a pretty useless name, anyway. Since no two people will agree on its meaning.
Anyway, I doubt people tagged what products are most sold on good weather. That's the kind of thing that is almost always discovered by statistic analysis. (We call some statistic analysis "machine learning", while others that do the exact same thing we don't.)
But it shouldn't and it won't.
I simply don't think a hand-designed decision tree for a specific task can be called AI.
I guess that depends on what you consider AI. In his example of "good weather -> more BBQ stuff", of course that might be some particular hardcoded rule that occurred to a human at some point, but it's far more likely that datamining identified that particular correlation, and many others (like the famous example of the grocery store that started stocking beer next to diapers when data mining discovered that beer and diapers were often bought together).
For any item in our stores we could get a list of other items that were commonly purchased together, for example. I'm sure it's even fancier nowadays.