Twenty years after IBM Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in a series of famous chess games, another computer program, AlphaGo by Google DeepMind, won against Lee Sedol, a top professional player in the very complex ancient game of Go. In 2011, between these two landmarks, we saw IBM’s Watson win against former champions in Jeopardy. These breakthroughs shows that artificial intelligence (AI) based programs can beat humans in even the most challenging of games.
Artificial Intelligence & B2B Automation and Compliance
In parallel with these very public victories, AI has made significant progress in other areas such as pattern recognition, allowing, for example, outstanding image recognition. Other projects such as Waymo, the Google self-driving cars, show how advanced hardware combined with the latest AI systems can take these types of solutions to the next level.
Breakthroughs in AI technology such as deep artificial neural networks form the basis of this development, but what is the relevance to B2B automation and compliance?
Many AI software components that were formerly available only in advanced research labs are now quickly becoming available to all of us. Many companies such as IBM and Google are making toolkits available that allow other vendors to integrate AI technology into their platforms AI will now quickly enter the mainstream of software applications. The opportunities are endless.
Artificial Intelligence, Taxation and General Compliance Opportunities
Watson-based systems are already making a notable difference in industries such as Medical and Finance. In B2B and B2C communications, most of the activity is focused on marketing and recommender systems. Experts are now also starting to examine applying AI in other areas, such as taxation and general compliance. Here at Sovos, we certainly see significant opportunities and are actively researching how artificial neural networks can take tax compliance to the next level. However, leaving compliance decisions to a piece of AI software raises some intriguing legal questions. Stay tuned for our upcoming piece on that subject.
