Everyone’s talking about Generative AI, but so far that’s not the AI that’s created the most business value. The top companies still build their businesses with Predictive AI.
For thousands of years humans have wanted to peer into the future. Ancient Greeks traveled to the Oracle of Delphi. In India, the sky voice (or Akaash vani) would pass messages about the future.
If you understood the future, you could build up great power and wealth. And that’s exactly what happened.
Businesses that try to predict their customers behavior is not a new thing. That’s why when you watch a sporting event, you’ll see advertisements for power drinks or sports gear. These are businesses trying to predict your behavior.
That’s why from the very beginning businesses have been very interested in the power of artificial intelligence. These companies looked at AI and saw the potential to predict the future.
Humans are good at predicting that someone who watches sports is more likely to buy a sports drink. But newer AI systems can use this simple pattern matching to scale it up to millions of customers with much more accurate predictions.
These systems analyze your purchase history over months or years to identify patterns in your behavior. They can then use these patterns to build a path of what you’ve done and make a pretty good guess about what you’ll do.
This power is widely used today.
You’ve experienced this power anytime you searched for something, received product recommendations, or gotten a song suggestion. This is the power of predictive artificial intelligence.
To some people this power might seem trivial. But think about the differences between the services that you use.
Why do you use Google or Bing over other search engines? Why would you use Spotify or Apple Music over other streaming services? Why would you use Amazon to make your next purchase?
It’s because these services are much better at predicting your behavior.
If you think about it, most of the services that have excelled over the past few decades have mastered this art of predicting. Predictive AI has been the quiet engine that’s been driving many of today’s largest companies.
Making predictions relies on what computer systems are good at. These systems can analyze huge amounts of data and identify patterns that would be difficult for humans to recognize. It can link many of your purchases and find patterns with what other customers have bought.
The biggest companies didn’t always get big by building new products. They got big by better predicting your behavior. Predictive AI made you better product.
The top companies have made billions of dollars perfecting the ability to sell you a tissue just before you sneeze.
It’s all done through Predictive AI’s large-scale statistics, probabilities, and data. The more data they have, the more accurately they can predict the future.