What are the different types of AI and how do they apply to your organization?

It seems like every month a new technology or form of AI emerges and changes how we approach day-to-day problems. The market is flooded with so many specialty solutions that “artificial intelligence” can mean many different things. However, not all types of artificial intelligence are created equal. As investments and the adoption of AI continue to rise, organizations need to be aware of the tradeoffs between different types of AI before jumping onboard.

Each type of artificial intelligence provides different benefits. AI can help you to find answers, it can make decisions for you, or help you learn and make better decisions on your own. In order to better understand the types of artificial intelligence, we broke it down into three easy-to-remember concepts: the librarian, the manager, and the teacher.

Types of AI

The Librarian:

This form of AI only gives you the information you ask for. The best example of this AI is Google search but we have also seen this expand out to innovations such as IBM Watson and Amazon Alexa.

• Gives you the information you ask for
• Requires people to know what they are looking for
• Acts independently
• Ethically sound (mostly)
• Does not scale action taking

The Manager:

This form of AI is considered supervised learning. Think predictive models that hand over decision-making abilities to the algorithm. The best examples are Google Ad targeting, YouTube content moderation, and Amazon resume screening.

• Makes decisions for people
• Inscrutable and hard to predict
• Silent mistakes
• Ethical questions
• Threatens jobs
• Really fast and scalable

The Teacher:

This is unsupervised learning. Unsupervised learning interacts with those it is teaching to gauge their understanding and how they learn. It looks for previously undetected patterns in a data set with no pre-existing labels and with minimal human supervision. This is the form of AI that helps humans make better decisions.

• Helps people understand so they can make better decisions
• Learns about your data so it can teach you what you don’t know
• Transparent and inspectable
• Focuses on facilitating action and scales quickly

Unsupervised is the largest vendor of this type of AI

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