"When people say 'AI software', what do they really mean? This is a critically important question to understanding the impact that AI can have on the retail industry (on any industry, really), and a significant source of the gap that exists between AI hype and reality.
"While McKinsey focuses on AI types of classification, prediction, and generation, I’ve found it more useful to look at natural language processing, computer vision, and prediction. But each of these are umbrella terms for lots of what amount to 'micro-capabilities', which is an important limitation when thinking about AI. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI, but sometimes referred to as Human-Level Artificial Intelligence) is at least 20 years off, according to experts in the field, and possibly 50 years. And both ends of the estimate acknowledge that some kind of breakthrough that we have not currently achieved would have to happen before we can get there – there is no current known path to achieving AGI."
AI systems can be applied to human interactions, but the key to teaching machines how to intuitively read human behavioral cues still remains unknown. After all, how can an algorithm accurately interpret variables as subjective as speech inflection? With this in mind, how can 'Human-Level Artificial Intelligence' be viable within our lifetimes if we don't know how to get there yet? The capabilities of AI technologies are expanding at an incredible pace, but there is still so much we need to discover and explore before our machines will be able to know how we feel by the sound of our voice.