FOCUS: Workflows and Procedures (Humans Intelligence Vs Classical Artificial Intelligence)
Artificial Intelligence: What, Why, How Pt3
By Marco Menichelli
- A Customer, calls a company’s Call Center to ask assistance about the energy bill;
- The Call Center Operator cannot assist the Customer without a “Customer ID” and so asks the Customer to provide him with his Customer ID;
- The Customer asks the Operator: “What is it?“;
- The Operator explains what the Customer ID is and help the customer find it on the ebergy bill;
- The Customer finds the Customer ID and returns it to the Operator;
- At this point, after having identified the Customer, The Operator is able to support him;
- The Operator has the goal to successfully close the call, otherwise he will receive a negative feedback, therefore he will answer every question the Customer might have while keeping in mind the objective to solve a specific problem.
“A Workflow is the sequence of steps involved in moving from the beginning to the end of a working process.”
As shown in the example below, Workflow is a rigid structure and follows rules that are defined a upfront by its designer.
In order to manage even a simple conversation, like the one between the Call Center Operator and the Customer described at the beginning of the paragraph, a simple Workflow is not enough. Indeed it will be required to prepare a number of “sub-workflows” that will be triggered to address exceptional cases that, however, must be planned upfront.
But, the Human Mind doesn’t work this way.
It’s true on the one hand the Call Center Operator might have a “question-answer” manual to help him solve problems, but on the other, in the eventuality of “out-of-procedure” questions, with the right knowledge the Call Center Operator will still be able to address those questions that were unplanned for and assist the Customer through overall pending procedure, with the aim of completing it.
Furthermore, the context of the question “What is it?” was logically deduced by the Call Center Operator even if the Customer did not offer any further detail.
Therefore, the substantial difference that exists in the procedures management, between Humans and Computers, lies in the fact that Humans have the need to arrive at the end of the procedure and complete it, and to do so, are able to adapt their behaviors to external stimuli.
Another example is reported below.
In this example (HIO (Synthetic Psyche) just DESTROYED Google Assistant), HIO, is able to manage infinite procedures (not Workflows), simultaneously in different languages, leave them pending to resume them later, and autonomous deduce the context of the user’s questions without any prior programming, thus autonomous adapting its behavior to external stimuli, with the need of completing the task assigned to it.
