Category: Sector Impacts

The travelling salesman problem You know the Travelling Salesman Problem? Find the shortest route that takes you to every city on a list and returns you home. It’s a hard problem. In fact it’s an NP-hard problem, where NP stands for non-deterministic polynomial time. Just in case you were in any doubt about how hard it is. But if you’re a grocery retailer, delivering the weekly shopping to millions of homes, or the country’s leading furniture maker... well, it’s a problem you have to solve. Who you gonna call? Tesco deliveries Tesco not only has to deliver hundreds of thousands...

Telemedicine “We’ve witnessed ten years of change in a month” is a typical description of how the pandemic is accelerating the use of telemedicine. Before the virus, video appointments made up only 1% of the 350m consultations which Britain’s National Health Service handles each year. Companies like Docly, eConsult and AccuRx are changing that. The latter claims that 90% of primary care clinics in England are now using its video-calling system. The most dramatic form of telemedicine is remote surgery. It is not new, but it is growing, and it offers enormous benefits. It can help overcome the shortage of...

Automated writing Back in 2014, the Los Angeles Times published a report about an earthquake three minutes after it happened. This feat was possible because a staffer had developed a bot (a software robot) called Quakebot to write automated articles based on data generated by the US Geological Survey. Today, AIs write hundreds of thousands of the articles that are published by mainstream media outlets every week. At first, most of the Natural Language Generation (NLG) tools producing these articles were provided by software companies like Narrative Science. Today, many media organisations have developed in-house versions. The BBC has Juicer,...

The pandemic and business continuity planning The pandemic is a severe stress test for the business continuity plans of global corporations. The operators of call centres are playing an important role in meeting that challenge, and it has not been easy. In normal times, if an earthquake hits Bangalore, you can switch capacity to your call centre in Manila. But what do you do when all the call centres around the world that serve your customers are hit – all at the same time? The big outsourcing call centre companies which serve corporate giants have hundreds of thousands of employees,...

Digital marketers have to deploy AI. They also have to defeat it In October 2017, Facebook altered the Instagram API to make it harder for users to search its giant database of photos. The change was a small element of the company’s response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, but it was a significant problem for parts of the digital marketing industry. Not long before, New York-based influencer marketing agency Amra & Elma had developed a platform that ingested data from Instagram, and allowed its client to use AI image classifiers to find very specific influencers. For instance, they could find...

Accountants and lawyers to use AI to cannibalise their business – before someone else does When you hear the word “automation...”, does your mind skip straight to “…destroys jobs”? If so, there should be a few stops in between. Automation is about removing friction, driving down costs, speeding processes up, and generally improving efficiency. Making goods and services better and cheaper is a good thing: it makes us all richer. There is scope to do this in all walks of life, and not least in professional services, such as accountancy and the law. Much of the work done by the...