Augmented Intelligence: What it is and Why Your Business Should Use it?

Learn and apply augmented intelligence in business scenarios to complement the efforts of human and machine intelligence and drive business growth exponentially.

Today artificial intelligence (AI) is at the driver’s seat of business performance. From machine-readable documents to AI customer service, businesses benefit a lot from these intelligent machines.

And not just reliable, accurate, and tireless repetitive work done in a few hours, but these AIs can help business managers with decision-making.

However, sometimes AI is not enough, and you must augment its capabilities with human intelligence. There you go; you have created an enhanced intelligence for your business. Read on to learn more.   

What Is Augmented Intelligence?

Augmented intelligence is a human-machine coordination concept. AI engineers and researchers have designed it to complement human knowledge under challenging situations through efficient decision-making. It is here to help the human workforce, not to replace them with machines and robots. 

It has many synonyms, and some of the popular ones are as below: 

• Intelligence Amplification
• Cognitive Augmentation
• Machine-Augmented Human Intelligence
• Enhanced Intelligence

Intelligence amplification also uses AI but only to enhance the performance of its human counterpart in business or personal situations. 

This technology cuts down many manual efforts humans need to make to get the final product, like merchandise, data insights, or market-ready software for services.

Businesses and end-users have already started utilizing machine-augmented human intelligence. For example, assisted driving in a self-driven car is the most common example. Collision avoidance warnings, assisted parking, etc., are also good instances.

You can also find augmented intelligence in computer software. 

For example, if you are working on an AI-based payroll processing tool, the software will automatically suggest you the next steps after a few days. It starts observing your working process on the app and then augmenting your effort in payroll processing.   

Purpose of Augmented Intelligence

The primary purpose of enhanced intelligence is to monetize an organization’s machine and human assets. When you separate these assets at the workplace, you do not get many jobs done. 

Other notable purposes are:

• To increase the range of human cognitive capabilities.
• To predict an action and its outcome and suggest to the human counterpart if the action is profitable or not.
• Intelligent machines scrub data and clean it so that human data scientists can analyze datasets and discover good patterns and market signals.   

Why Is Augmented Intelligence Important?

Intelligence amplification is essential because it creates a harmonious relationship between intelligent machines and the human workforce. There are increasing reports of workforce agitation due to the excessive use of robots in manufacturing plants and significant workforce layoffs. 

However, these businesses could enhance the capabilities of their workforce and make them work on projects that would earn money for the companies. For example, training the workforce for retail, sales, marketing, and digital marketing augmented intelligence to help the company sell more products or services.

It also reduces repetitive tasks and busy work so that you can put your skilled worker to good use, like coming up with novel marketing strategies, converting leads to customers, designing new revenue models for upcoming products/services, and many more.       

How Does Augmented Intelligence Work?

Before exploring its working, you first need to understand what capabilities AIs and humans offer.

When you combine all the above in a system where humans work hand in hand with AI systems, that is how an augmented intelligence program works.

Intelligence amplification uses many technologies to facilitate human-machine collaboration, and these are as mentioned below:

• Artificial neural networks mimic human brain functions and help machines with spatial navigation
• Machine learning to learn from experience, mistakes, and human feedback
• NLP, or natural language processing technology, helps AIs to understand human-spoken languages
• Face, image, video, and character recognition through optical systems
• Spotting patterns on data, video, wireframes, and images via pattern recognition technology
• Enhanced intelligence also uses logical reasoning algorithms to deduce elements from data, rationalize what it encounters, and create forecasts

Once all the above technology are in one place and hotwired, an augmented intelligence system performs its tasks by utilizing the following functions:

• It understands the data inputs and the outcome of data analysis.
• The system can interpret and separate new data from old data.
• It reasons which data is valuable, which is not, which data should be archived, and more
• The augmented intelligence learns from human inputs and feedback and then adjusts its workflow or codebase. 
• It can also ensure that the business complies with regulations by creating a database for quality control, risk assessment, security codes, etc.     

Why Should Businesses Use Augmented Intelligence?

Primarily, businesses must use enhanced intelligence to reduce the burden of manual efforts on their workforce. Human is good at generalizing concepts, creative thinking, and emotional intelligence. It would take centuries to develop such an AI software that can possess all the above qualities.

Hence, businesses must augment these qualities with machine expertise like ingesting terabytes of data, tireless working capabilities, and accuracy in repetitive task handling.

Thus, when you present your marketing or finance experts with organized data, they can quickly create business insights out of the database with instructions from AI. Otherwise, it would take teams to collect data, cleanse it, and organize it so that data scientists can analyze data.

And this is not just for data analytics. Augmented intelligence is applicable in most industries like manufacturing, hospitality, health care, banking, and more.        

Augmented Intelligence Vs. Artificial Intelligence

Since both AI and augmented intelligence use AI and ML algorithms, you might inquire about the differences between these two. Find the significant differences in this table below:

Augmented Intelligence’s Role in Big Data

Big data is the result of data mining in different industries. For example, you need to find out the efficiency of your product from the global market. You would start collecting data from dealers, supply chain providers, warehouses, retail shops, customers, etc. Now, you have got terabytes of data in multiple databases.

It would take thousands of working hours and multiple teams to verify the data, clean it, organize it in clusters, and finally ingest it into business intelligence (BI) software for pattern analysis.

You can minimize the effort and involve the cost of big data by augmenting your data analysts with AI and ML programs. Intelligence machines will automatically analyze and organize data at the source and store them on a secure cloud so that human data scientists can study the datasets. 

During extensive data analysis, AIs can also augment human capabilities by accomplishing repetitive tasks that your data scientists would otherwise have to perform. 

Now, with the Internet of Things, businesses have to deal with more data since these intelligent sensors collect data from the real world throughout their lifetime. Likely, you would only rely on something other than human capabilities to process such enormous databases. Instead, it would help if you augmented your human workforce with AI and ML models.       

Benefits of Augmented Intelligence

The significant benefit of cognitive augmentation is avoiding any severe loss to business processes due to faulty AIs making decisions in real-world scenarios. Here, the human workforce supervises the AIs’ activities and makes course corrections when necessary. 

Some other significant benefits are as mentioned below:

• Empowers business leaders to make flawless decisions for mission-critical projects like hiring recruits, setting up a new manufacturing plant, etc.
• The AI program of any augmented intelligence system can scrub millions of references in minutes and get you the proper references you need for decision-making.
• Intelligence amplification saves time by validating, cleaning, organizing, and filtering massive databases.
• Enhanced intelligence models for R&D, product development, marketing, and sales can help businesses by predicting outcomes of specific hypotheses or real-world actions.
• Eliminate bias and human error from business processes.
• Reduces costs of business operations by maximizing outputs from fewer employees.
• You can send trainees and un-skilled workforce to the field faster by aiding them with augmented intelligence through smartphones or VR gadgets.
• It accurately completes repetitive and time-limited tasks in a short duration, thereby helping business operations.         

Augmented Intelligence: Learning Resources

Augmented Intelligence

This outstanding Amazon book helps you combine machine and human intelligence efficiently. Hence, this is a must-read for you if you are a business manager, CEO, CTO, COO, and data scientist.

The book mainly focuses on the following:

• The requirements for intelligence amplification
• Risks, ethics, and governance of data for intelligence amplification
• Weak augmentation and substantial augmentation  

Augmented Intelligence: Smart Systems

This book is an ideal resource for understanding the underlying concepts of human-machine symbiosis. 

Also, the book is a part of the Digital Epistemologies and New Literacies series from Amazon.   

Augmented Intelligence in Healthcare

The healthcare niche is one industry that can benefit the most from human-machine collective intelligence. This book explains all the nuances of intelligence amplification for the benefit of healthcare professionals.

It focuses on topics like the ones mentioned below: 

• Speed of diagnosis and efficiency in the healthcare industry
• Better decision-making by human doctors in challenging clinical situations
• Real-world cases studies of intelligence amplification in medical practices  

Wrapping Up

So, now you know what augmented intelligence is and how this technology is relevant to your business. And this cutting-edge tech will not just stop here. 

It will replace every manual effort humans put into the production and service industry. Your business processes will become more efficient and cost-effective and require troubleshooting.

You may also be interested in artificial general intelligence (AGI), online courses to learn artificial intelligence (AI), and examples of artificial intelligence (AI) in our daily lives.