Artificial intelligence is rapidly advancing in the enterprise and “eventually AI will replace ERP‚” asserts Alex Woodie in IT Jungle’s story “Will AI Replace ERP?”
Highlights from the article include:
- AI is venturing out into the real world. One man at the cutting edge of this trend is Tom Siebel.
- The founder of Siebel Systems‚ the CRM software company that Oracle acquired for $5.8 billion in 2005‚ is several years into his latest venture‚ dubbed C3.ai‚ which applies machine learning techniques to big data gathered across the Internet of Things to help its clients squeeze more efficiency out of their operations.
- Siebel says‚ “When I think of IoT and predictive analytics and big data‚ it looks to us like an entire replacement market for everything that’s taken place in enterprise application software.”
- “The next generation of CRM is CRM meets AI … much more precise revenue forecasting‚ product forecasting‚ value added customer service capability‚” Siebel said. “[AI] replaces the CRM market. It replaces the ERP market‚ it replaces the supply chain software market‚ and it replaces manufacturing automation‚ absolutely 100 percent replacement.”
- The larger point that Siebel is making is that the instrumentation of the world through sensors – and the potentially valuable insights that we can glean from the data collected by those sensors – will dramatically shift what we can do with computers‚ and frankly what we need computers to do for us.
- Siebel says why not just use sensors to plug the real world into the digital world‚ and then use machine learning to optimize the behavior?
- “We’re able to solve classes of problems that were previously unsolvable‚” Siebel continued. “We’re seeing this sensoring of the value chain that is I think a very significant economic and social phenomenon.”
- “This is across every industry – healthcare‚ travel‚ transportation‚ financial services‚ discrete manufacturing‚ automotive‚ aerospace. Value chains are all becoming sensored. If you look at the rate of IoT adoption across these value chains‚ it’s exponential growth.”
Alex Woodie also featured Tom Siebel in a Datanami Q&A in April 2017.
Read the full IT Jungle article: https://www.itjungle.com/2017/06/19/will-ai-replace-erp/
