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Artificial intelligence levels show AI is not created equal. Do you know what the vendor is selling?

06/30/2020 By

Just like there are eight levels to analytics as mentioned in a recent Spend Matters PRO brief, artificial intelligence (AI) has various stages of the technology today — even though there is no such thing as true AI by any standard worth its technical weight.

But just because we don’t yet have true AI doesn’t mean today’s “AI” can’t help procurement improve its performance. We just need enough computational intelligence to allow software to do the tactical and non-value-added tasks that software should be able to perform with all of the modern computational power available to us. As long as the software can do the tasks as well as an average human expert the vast majority of the time (and kick up a request for help when it doesn't have enough information or when the probability it will outperform a human expert is less than the expert performing a task) that's more than good enough.

The reality is, for some basic tactical tasks, there are plenty of software options today (e.g., "intelligent" invoice processing). And even for some highly specialized tasks that we thought could never be done by a computer, we have software that can do it better, like early cancerous growth detection in MRIs and X-rays.

That being said, we also have a lot of software on the market that claims to be artificial intelligence but that is not even remotely close to what AI is today, let alone what useful software AI should be. For software to be classified as AI today, it must be capable of "artificial learning" and "evolving its models or codes" and improve over time.

So, in this PRO article, we are going to define the levels of AI that do exist today, and that may exist tomorrow. This will allow you to identify what truth there is to the claims that a vendor is making and whether the software will actually be capable of doing what you expect it to.

Not counting true AI, there are five levels of AI that are available today or will likely be available tomorrow:

  • Level 0: Applied Indirection
  • Level 1: Assisted Intelligence
  • Level 2: Augmented Intelligence
  • Level 3: Cognitive Intelligence
  • Level 4: Autonomous Intelligence

Let’s take a look at each group.

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