A bot is a software brick responsible for a specific mission. We are quite far from Wall-E! What defines this little robot is not its appearance, but its role. Here is a very simple example: your telephone answering machine is a bot, because it reacts for you to an external request. In reality, as soon as a software takes care of a job for you, autonomously , we can talk about a bot. Suffice to say that we are surrounded by hundreds of bots; and the phenomenon is not new. What is, on the other hand, is wanting to use them to transform the company and take the digital turn.
Strong AI and Weak AI
One of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence, Marvin Lee Minsky (1927-2016) defined his discipline as follows: "A science whose goal is to make a machine do tasks that humans accomplish how to build phone number list using their intelligence." AI is generally divided into two parts: weak AI and strong AI. The latter, long reserved for science fiction, is an artificial intelligence capable of doing the same things as humans, while being self-aware. But we are starting to hear some experts announce that we will experience strong AI, perhaps within 30 years. Or... a thousand years! Projections are still extremely variable.
In the meantime, weak AI offers a field of possibilities largely neglected by companies, with the exception of the GAFIM which have taken a solid head start. Weak AI is already achieving feats, with of course the victory of Deep Blue (IBM) against Garry Kasparov, during a chess game in 1997, but also, since then, victories in poker or the game of go, robots learning to bluff and become unpredictable. Autonomous cars, voice assistants, AI capable of playing the piano, painting canvases or editing films, but also the explosion of IoT, 100% connected stores, without checkout... the examples are swarming.
However, perhaps the most interesting thing lies elsewhere, far from these emblematic examples: in the way AI can transform the daily tasks of businesses .