The 4th Industrial Revolution is around for the last couple of years – fueled by Data in place of Oil – and Artificial Intelligence [ AI ]. AI has become the all-pervasive driving force affecting the various institutions that drive the global economy and our lives in general. AI has moved out from the preserves of sci-fi movies and ‘futurism’ to our daily chores  whether in the form of Internet of Things [ IoT ] , smart phones, assisted driving, e-commerce or even in our preferences , choices or mood swings. The serious apprehension of jobs disappearing fast and efforts to re-design them are real . This has affected the corporate business models in all industry verticals -defense,  finance , stock trading, travel, logistics, space missions, communications, infrastructure , health care , medical diagnostics,and education.

It is very timely that three senior executives of Cognizant [www.cognizant.com] , No 17 in Fortune Future List , competing in the digital landscape as a global leader in business and technology [ Revenue at $ 13.49 billion per 2016 annual report] , have come out with a book titled ” What To Do , When Machines Do Everything – a very valuable  field guide for practitioners all over the world. The authors , Malcolm Frank , Executive Vice President , Strategy and Marketing , Paul Roehrig , Vice President -Strategy and Marketing in Cognizant’s Digital Business and founder of the Cognizant Center for the future of work and Ben Pring who leads the Center for the future of work , three thought leaders collectively bring to the table vast practical knowledge of many years of relevant experience in this field.

The book proposes an action plan to industry leaders at all levels , providing  valuable rules of thumb, insights and guidelines to thrive in the new era of intelligent machines.

The 12 Chapters deal with the impact of Machine Learning and AI in today’s job design and Corporate Strategy and Business Models and propose a 5 part business model with the acronym AHEAD – Automate – Halo- Enhance- Abundance – Discovery . AUTOMATE denotes the need to outsource all rote and computational work to machines, HALO talks about the need to instrument products and people and leverage the data exhaust they create – the Code Halos , ENHANCE works to treat the computer as a colleague that can increase your job, productivity and satisfaction , ABUNDANCE covers the opportunity to open new markets as a result of the man-machine collaboration , and DISCOVERY tell us how to leverage AI to conceive new products, services and new industry through Innovation at the velocity and scale of AI combined with R&D .

Chapter 1 introduces the topic and the proposed business model AHEAD treating AI as Systems of Intelligence , Chapter 2 explains how we can turn about the feared ‘Stall ‘ scenario to one of Growth by understanding the new machine and situating it in the right business models , Chapter 3 tell us how to get AHEAD with the new model at the time of ‘Churn’  in the existing business , Chapter 4 explains the new machine  in detail terming the Systems of Intelligence as a Software that learns with a massive hardware processing power coupled intelligently with huge amounts of data and human inputs.

Chapter 5 talks about the new raw material – Data [ Data is the new Oil ] and how we can leverage business analytics to turn the data into meaning . Chapter 6 to 11  explains the business model AHEAD in detail cautioning how to avoid the various traps on the way, to treat Automation as a means to an end, to instrument everything and change the game when dealing with Code Halos , treat winning with Data as the No 1 competitive game in nearly every business , how to amplify human performance with the new machine  and  double down on being more human to allow us to focus on what we do well [ empathy , relationship building and making sense of complex situations] , and find 10x opportunities with the new machine. Chapter 11 advocates for fresh ideas through a process of Discovery to manage Innovation for the Digital Economy. Chapter 12 summarizes the key learning and calls for Action at all levels.

There are three prevalent views on AI , the Dystopian – we should fear our pending robot overlords , the Utopian – everything is awesome and technology will be the answer , and the Pragmatists – the future can be good if we make smart ,practical decisions. The authors side with the Pragmatists and tell us to go out and invent the future,and not predicting it , hand in hand with the new machines.

The book is well researched and eminently readable with a number of live  case studies from many industry verticals and fills in a need for a practitioner’s field guide on AI .

Pages 235 , Published by John Wiley and Sons,New Jersey , Price $28 in USA , Copyright 2017 by Cognizant Technology Solutions U.S Corporation.


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