AI Convention Europe: What happened and what did we learn?

Nov 11, 2018 11:00:00 AM

We were at the first edition of the AI Convention which took place this October in Brussels, where Moonoia -together with Contextor and Shoot &Prove - was the Platinum Sponsor and presented KAPTAIN - our transformative, AI-powered document processing app.

This event was a great opportunity for non experts (ie: non-specialists or generalists) to discover the latest trends in Artificial Intelligence and to meet industry experts and enthusiasts. We have collected some insights from the congress to share with you. And we were very happy to discover that the feedback we received and information shared in sessions and workshops is aligned with our corporate mission. 

A day filled with speaking sessions, workshops, showcases and exchanges from around and beyond the Belgian AI world provided attendees with insights about the impact of AI - including issues, challenges and opportunities.

The opening keynote was driven by Mieke De Ketelaere, Director at SAS, Advisor on Digital Transformation & Artificial Intelligence and Nominee ICT Woman of the Year 2018. During the discussion, she gave us a short, interesting introduction to Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. We looked at practical implications of AI on people's lives and livelihoods by exploring AI-influenced use cases - reviewing both positive and negative examples of the influence of AI. 

Ms. De Ketelaere introduced the idea that nowadays AI can autogenerate written text and speech (ie. new features in Gmail). With AI becoming ubiquitous in our daily activities, the perception for many users is that AI must be easy. In fact, not really. As Moonoia has found in developing the "brain" behind docBrain - our AI solution for complex document processing. Our goal is to make AI easy for users in a wide variety of environments. But the underlying technology is complex, requiring deep subject matter expertise and rigid training.

Ms. De Ketelaree shared some examples of faulty AI-led outcomes - where AI goes wrong - which can harm the overall vision of AI and the opportunities created from this technology. She wrapped up her session by concluding that the biggest challenge with AI is to gain trust from its opinions and outcomes. 

Later in the day, our KAPTAIN experts teamed up in a session with Christophe Castan to discuss on how enterprises from a wide variety of industries - such as insurance, banking, finance transport, energy and retail - are incorporating AI technology into their business strategies to find solutions that traditional technologies can no longer address. The first part of the session shared insight, challenges and best practices from a project which incorporates AI and deep neural network technology to transform business processes for a large insurance company in Belgium. Christophe Castan reinterpreted in an interesting way a famous quote “Do not only think about what AI can do for you but what can you do for AI”. According to Mr. Castan, it’s really important to properly, thoroughly define your project with clear and comprehensive objectives. It shouldn’t be a revolution - you should be able to demonstrate these propositions with simple use cases.

In the second session Luc Cavelier, from Moonoia, described what KAPTAIN is and how this technology is empowering business transformation incorporating machine learning, deep neural networks models, robotic process automation (RPA) and mobile technologies. Luc emphasized how to "simplify-AI" within the organization - explaining that - unlike self-driving cars for which the idea exists since 1995 but are not yet a reality - business processes which leverage AI technology are no longer a future vision but are rapidly being implemented in practical use cases.

We ended the afternoon with a presentation from Ms. Myriam Broeders Chief Technology Officer for Microsoft Belgium. She described the relevance of Artificial Intelligence to each one of us: individually, as organizations, and as a society. In her presentation, she shared an interesting use case from a Chatbot called Bertje which will help citizens from Roselaere. Bertje aims to improve the service and provide information in a very natural & intuitive way. She also views AI as an asset impacts disciplines like Humanities and Environmental Sciences. Finally Ms. Broeders concluded her presentation with an interesting figure in terms of business transformation. According to her by 2020, 85% of enterprises will be using AI on at least one process.

Did you miss the AI Convention but would like to know more about our solution KAPTAIN? No problem - you can find the digital presentation HERE.

If you also would like to read the other speaker's presentations you can find them on the program page of the event here.

Finally, you can download the KAPTAIN brochure below.

brochure-KAPTAIN-recto



Interested to know more about how Artificial Intelligence can augment your document-centric processes? Contact us to schedule your own workshop, request a demo or speak with the team members who made this project happen.

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