Will we start using Alexa-style assistants soon...?
- By Gareth Byatt
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- 03 Jun, 2018
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Are we going to see a “Hey Alexa – what are our most pressing risks today?” type of “Ask the machine” future at some point?
A discussion by Gareth and Chris Corless
In short – yes, although perhaps it will be a different-named tool – hopefully one with a positive-sounding name to help us take risk!
We are already seeing chat bots in place to take care of some basic questions about insurance, as the team at Google has advise (see this article in StrategicRISK).
With the right infrastructure in place, we can use a voice-activated assistant to provide a level of analysis and hopefully deep insights into the performance of risk management. Clearly, it will need architecture to set up. Once it is in place, it could provide us with specific information about the risks that our organisation faces today, in the coming 3-6 months, and how they are currently being managed.
Hopefully when combined with powerful computing that is coming forth, these assistants will be able to handle vast volumes of data and present insights and answers from them. This could lead to faster surfacing of new risks and potential (and actual) issues that need addressing.
It could also provide us with analysis of past solutions to similar problems and let us know which ones were effective. For example,they could provide insights into “what performance risks today are showing signs of issues” and we could follow up by asking it “what is the recommended solution and why”. Our voice-activated digital assistant could perform a quick analysis of a broad data set to provide insights that would be broader than a traditional management team, because as humans there will always be limits to how much data we can digest – and of course we have many, many biases that can prevent us from taking the best course of action.
One thing we need to take into account in the design of such digital assistants is to not build our own biases into their data analysis.
When may such digital assistants become the norm?That’s the $64,000 question…!
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