AI’s Next Great Challenge: Understanding the Nuances of Language

Humans have long identified language as one of the key indicators of our intelligence. But with new natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, AI is starting to catch up. That said, there is still a lot of work to do before AI can truly understand language. Consider the question “Who are my customers?” It presents a simple enough task: Create a list of customers. But what about the question “Who are my best customers in the Pacific Northwest for a particular product?” Now we’ve added a layer of complexity that requires a number of integrated tasks to answer qualifying questions, such as: How is “best” defined? Where is each customer located? What factors contribute to one customer being interested in one product versus another? Though we’ve been working on NLP for a long time, it’s still early days. The hope is that as NLP improves, it will allow AI to change everything about how we interact with our machines.