What do todays trials mean for innovation and AI tomorrow?

On behalf of the Brainpool team, I hope that yourself, family, friends and colleagues are managing to remain healthy and optimistic throughout this challenging time as the world confronts the upheaval and disruption caused by the Coronavirus. At this early stage, the toll this crisis will incur on individuals, families, business, economy and even politics is unclear and will likely remain so for some time. What is clear is that the world is being confronted with the opportunity and need for change.

A side effect of COVID-19 is that it has illuminated many of the gaps, cracks and flaws in our society, from self-centered mindsets to systems, operations and business models that are unprepared and unequipped to adapt to the scale of such disruption. Individual and collective notions of what is important within our society has been sharply put into contrast; the answer being human lives, human well-being and the services and systems in place to support them. Highlighting what we already knew, technology has emerged as instrumental in creating some semblance of a normal life and maintaining connectivity with friends, family and co-workers even when it is required that we be apart.

A silver-lining to this harrowing yet unifying and life-changing event is that if we choose to learn from this experience, and combine those learnings with action, we can create a better and more resilient world.

At Brainpool, we believe that wider adoption of technologies such as AI and Machine Learning could have played a key role in mitigating, perhaps even averting, this crisis and the impact on business and people’s livelihood. Applications that have emerged as being critical to adapting to situations such as this in the future include:

Predictive Modelling
Demand forecasting
Supply chain planning
Customer intelligence and pricing activity.
Optimisation techniques to maximise production efficiency
Engineering solutions to ensure streamlined scalability

However, the combination of complex subject matter, a lack of mainstream understanding and in many industries these technologies being regarded as a tertiary focus has contributed to the present situation.

For Brainpool, one key takeaway from this event is clear. To truly harness this opportunity and need for change, tools such as AI and ML cannot remain incomprehensible or inaccessible, their benefits vague, their role in business strategy and survival unclear. Businesses and industry need to create a vision for how these tools can be applied to better prepare themselves - and by extension their employees and their families - for every challenge the future will present, from the day-to-day to the life-changing.

However, if opportunities and imperatives for innovation were the equivalent to a full-proof roadmap the innovation highway would be far more crowded and less fraught with risk. The reality is that innovation, particularly those involving AI or machine learning, is complex, time consuming and requires psychological and financial investment. It requires a shift in business and industry thought, vision and focus from today to tomorrow, the present to the future; and how to best prepare to meet its unpredictable demands.

Beginning your ‘AI journey’ is challenging at the best of times, let alone when adapting to the demands of a crisis. Yet it is often in a crisis where the greatest opportunities to innovate at the individual, societal, business and industry level are born. That’s where Brainpool would like to offer our support. Should you be interested in learning how AI can help your business prepare and adapt to the demands of the future, Brainpool is well positioned to support you throughout the journey. After this experience, com