Ron Schmelzer – Managing Partner and Principal Analyst for Cognilytica

Artificial intelligence frightens some, excites others, and captivates just about everyone. Inflated expectations about AI’s potential for good & bad have accompanied its narrative since antiquity, when as American author Pamela McCorduck wrote, it originated with "an ancient wish to forge the gods." Modern sentiments about AI continue to fuel some very basic misunderstandings about its nature, as well as what it can and can’t do (yet). To help us analyze the seemingly concealed reality within this opacity of hype, we called upon Ron Schmelzer, Managing Partner and Principal Analyst for Cognilytica, an AI-focused analyst and advisory firm. In this absorbing episode, Ron guides us through a brief history of AI, its potential to augment & multiply human productivity, and why 3-5 years from now if a business doesn’t utilize AI bots it will be the equivalent of not having a website. Along the way we’ll learn what Amazon realized from deploying automation that caused it to hire more people than ever, which career offers the biggest opportunity to take advantage of the burgeoning growth in AI, and how C-suite executives should be thinking about this transformative technology for competitive advantage.