Business

Using A.I. can be risky business

For years, companies have operated under the assumption that in order to improve their artificial intelligence software and gain a competitive advantage, they must gather enormous amounts of user data—the lifeblood of machine learning. But increasingly, collecting massive amounts of user information can be a major risk. Laws like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, and […]

Business

Can A.I. bring back the three-martini lunch?

Imagine the life of an advertising executive and a scene from Mad Men is likely to come to mind: Don Draper snake-charming a pair of Kodak marketing executives with a perfectly crafted pitch about the emotional pull of nostalgia (“It’s delicate, but potent…”) in order to win the account for their new slide projector. “This […]

Business

Why smart-city tech has lost its buzz

Just a few years ago, smart cities, a catch-all phrase for connecting urban infrastructure like parking meters and stoplights online, had major buzz. The idea was to use machine learning to crunch data collected across cities to, for example, minimize traffic delays and reduce pollution. But smart city projects haven’t taken off as quickly as expected, […]

Business

HireVue drops facial monitoring amid A.I. algorithm audit

The journalist Malcolm Gladwell, on his podcast, “Revisionist History,” devoted a recent episode to his theory of “hiring nihilism.” It is Gladwell’s belief that people are so bad at predicting who will perform well at a given role—especially based on traditional screening criteria such as CVs and candidate interviews—that one should simply concede that all […]