Divining great decisions is elusive in that there are many factors besides the speed that is required in today's fast-paced world.  Decisions require considering more information and contextual impact than ever before.  The need for speed with increasing complexity begs for technical assistance from Cognitive AI.  This column will look into three of these factors and how cognitive powers can be applied to assist the decision maker.

Assisting Knowledge-Intense Decisions

Knowledge-based workers and high-level professionals can benefit from an AI assist.  AI can search, read, understand, and categorize various sources of unstructured data (such as documents, voice, and video) faster than any human.  Even teams of researchers can't keep up with AI, especially when dealing with emerging new levels and sources of information.  Wouldn't you want your most-trusted experts assisted with the latest information worldwide?  If so, AI can help.

Assisting Algorithmic-Intense Decisions

Today, great decisions can be made by having the right set of algorithms, applied in the proper sequence, to come up with optimal decisions.  Analytics or poly-analytics can be further leveraged by using cognitive assists to decide on new combinations and sequences, replacing the human trial and error application of filters and algorithms.  Predictive algorithms can be enhanced by machine learning and cognitive AI as a side benefit.  Wouldn't you want a suggestion on what analytics to use?  If so, AI can help.

Assisting Situation-Intense Decisions

AI can assist the decision maker by considering all the contexts that could be affected by a decision, while iteratively gathering additional information on the impact of a decision or a series of decisions strung together over time.  This is a difficult task for most of us.  Wouldn't you want an understanding of the impact of a decision given all of the contexts it might affect?  If so, AI can help.

Net; Net

We need to move the needle on decisions by collaborating with AI/Bots, as well as other people.  The day of isolated decisions is drawing to a close.  Even if you are as smart as they come, you can't compete with the speed and complexity that AI can attain.  Why not leverage AI as a collaborator in your decisions?

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