Ai for Business

I was reading about some recent advancements in AI, and I came across an article on how researchers are trying to measure pain using artificial intelligence. It immediately caught my attention. Pain is such a personal and complicated feeling, so the idea that AI could somehow understand or quantify it sounded very interesting. That curiosity made me read a few more papers and articles on the topic. It was only a cursory read, but even then I felt the work was interesting enough to share. Illustration by Rajashree Rajadhyax Why Pain Measurement Matters Pain may seem like something each of us simply feels and explains, but in healthcare it is one of the most difficult things to assess. Two people with the same issue can describe completely different levels of pain. Sometimes people under-report their discomfort because they do not want to bother anyone, and sometimes they simply cannot express it. This includes infants, patients in intensive care, people under anaesthesia, and those with...

  Imagine this: It's 1930 in London, and you need to wake up early for work. You’re not worried about missing your morning routine because, right on time, a knocker-upper arrives. Armed with a long stick, they tap persistently on your window until you're awake. For those on the upper floors, they might even shoot dried peas at the glass to make sure you’re roused! Strange as it sounds, this was a genuine profession before alarm clocks became affordable and reliable. Today, it’s almost laughable to think of hiring someone just to wake us up, but back then, it was indispensable. It’s a perfect reminder that many jobs we rely on today might one day seem just as unusual. Image coursey: Wikipedia. A knocker-up in Leeuwarden , 1947 The AI paradox When reliable alarm clocks came along, the job of the knocker-upper naturally faded away. Back in 1914, The Guardian even published a piece lamenting how “the cheap American clock” was “killing the industry” in London. Doesn’t that sound fa...

  A new frontier in the field of Artificial Intelligence are AI agents. We have looked at what AI agents are in my previous article here. Just as humans evolved, AI too is evolving and the progress is in the direction of autonomy. Sophistication and capability of AI is slowly being judged by how autonomous it is. How much human intervention is needed to complete the goals. AI is transitioning from software that is trained for specific tasks to AI agents that are designed to achieve defined goals by operating in a given environment where they plan, reason and decide autonomously with some human intervention. As these AI agents move from research labs to shop floors and board rooms, conversations around them are often clouded by jargon. In this article I’ve touched upon some key AI agent terms, explaining their core concepts and how they work. Core Concepts (What AI Agents Are) 1. AI Agent At its core, an AI agent is a digital worker. It is a program that acts on behalf of a user to ...

Image by Rajashree Rajadhyax It was the end of a long day, and I'd been focused on a challenge common to my work: getting an AI to align with a client's specific vision. This constant push and pull is the story of my life with AI—it's an incredible tool that amazes me one moment and drives me crazy the next. When I'm working with AI for my clients and also for my own projects, I can't help but wonder: are creativity and unpredictability two sides of the same coin? On one hand, I think AI is incredibly creative. It helps me generate all kinds of cool stuff—images, music, videos, whatever I need. It helps me find things, write a quick poem for a special event, or summarize long articles I don't have time to read. When I give it free rein, it really shines. I love how creative it is and I'm totally happy with the results. But then, there's the other side of the coin. The very same AI can be a source of significant challenge when I'm working on a client ...

  AI Agents Explained. Image by Rajashree Rajadhyax Everyone’s using chat companions like Chat GPT, Perplexity, Claude and the like. You’ll agree that we all find them useful in many ways. Just as we were getting a grip on generative AI, the term AI agents started gaining popularity.  Everybody’s talking  about "AI agents" now, but most of the time, it's either overhyped, vague, or poorly defined. Every week, there’s a post claiming, “We built an AI agent that will change your life.” But peel back the marketing gloss, and you’ll find a wide range of systems,  from simple scripts that run a series of prompts, to complex multi-step, self-directed workflows, all being labelled “agents.”  The truth is: AI agents aren’t a single thing with a rigid definition. They can have different levels of independence, and once you see that range, all the buzz feels clearer. The Core Idea of an AI Agent At its heart, a software can be called an ‘AI agent’ if it can: 1. Perceive ...