The Middle East is better positioned for digital transformation than many other regions because it is not over-encumbered with complex legacy IT systems that have been heavily customised over time, according to Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder of research and analysis consultancy Deep Analysis and author of bestseller “Practical Artificial Intelligence – An Enterprise Playbook.”
According to analyst Alan Pelz-Sharpe, some technology providers are using this educational gap to sell their products or show their skills in a better light. Other vendors offer free, if sometimes rudimentary, training to help them understand AI better while explaining the basics of AI while at the same time selling their products.
In this interview Alan Pelz-Sharpe shares lessons learned from existing information management projects using artificial intelligence and machine learning.
“That is quite different in the sense that people are building their own products and platforms with AWS,” Pelz-Sharpe said. “I’m not saying you can easily swap out, but you can move your storage from Amazon to [Microsoft] Azure, to Rackspace, to Google. You’re not terribly locked in. It’s a monthly subscription.”
“AI is offered in some legal discovery software systems, and over time all these specialized vendors will leverage AI and machine learning,” said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder and principal analyst at Deep Analysis. He added that the AI-powered feature of Alfresco Governance Services is one of the first such offerings from a more general information management vendor. “It is positioned to augment the specialized vendors’ work, essentially curating and capturing relevant bodies of information for deeper analysis.”
Whether you’re streamlining the business operations, revitalizing customer experience, or implementing end-to-end business processes, there are two key capabilities in 2020 that will be significant differentiators. By combining low-code process platforms alongside robotic process automation (RPA), organizations can quickly deploy new business process solutions.
The digital process automation market has eclipsed business process management (from which it evolved) and is experiencing renewed growth. That’s according to our new report that assesses the state of the digital process automation market in 2019.
One of the highlights was Alan Pelz-Sharpe’s keynote on artificial intelligence (AI). He shared stories of startups trying to solve information governance challenges. They would show him their solution and he would quickly realize they hadn’t spoken to any records managers. Pelz-Sharpe stressed the need for records managers to learn what AI can do as they have the organizational knowledge to provide the proper guidance. More importantly, if records managers don’t get involved, AI will take their jobs and likely won’t do it very well.
The fact that SharePoint’s been around for nearly two decades, pre-dating widespread cloud adoption, compounds the issue. Pelz-Sharpe described one of his clients, a utility company, whose SharePoint on-premises footprint has grown over the years to 12,000 SharePoint sites. “They have no idea what is in them, and no idea what to do with them,” Pelz-Sharpe said. “These things can be complex. It’s a recognized problem, so the more experience, skills and tools Microsoft can bring to help, the better.”
While there are many systems that identify profanity to filter it out, Deep Analysis founder Alan Pelz-Sharpe said doing it at the OCR level is not common. “There are many other vendors that analyze and extract text from images and memes, though they don’t necessarily utilize OCR,” he said. “Today, newer vendors tend to also leverage machine learning, computer vision and artificial intelligence.” Pelz-Sharpe added that products like WebPurify or Microsoft Azure Content Moderator are good first steps in stopping profanity before it is published or distributed.