Key Takeaways on AI and Search

The following are the key takeaways I got from Will Hays, CEO, Lucidworks keynote on "Deep Learning for AI."

1. The Lucene/Solr revolution has been won.  The open-source information retrieval software library and enterprise search platform have become the standard in how to innovate and bring products to market. Applications like Salesforce and Slack are powered by Solr. Search activates AI as evidenced by Netflix, Google Assistant, Alexa at home. 

2. Work life is antiquated, inefficiency is frustrating. Search is a gateway into a perfect user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX). NLP, computer vision, deep learning all came out of search. AI enables you to anticipate needs and understand intent to make more intelligent application and technology experiences for the enterprise - its employees and its customers.

3. Search is the most powerful, natural, assistive way to humanize AI. Humanizing AI still requires a lot of hard work from humans. We need to empower humans who can bring context. Honor people -- build technology that respects the people that are deploying and managing it. Move from a data-centric to human-centric point of view. The Fusion stack empowers the user community to think about human experiences. Don’t just track activity, understand intent. Think about experiences that can be delivered through data. Automating usefulness is hard. We are trying to lower bar to deliver perfect human experiences.

4. The future of business hinges on the outcomes of billions of digital moments – transforming them into meaningful outcomes: finding the correct product; connecting to the right person; knowing exactly what to do next; driving relevant conversations; resolving a problem. Predictive merchandising – aid in spotting trends and outliers and surface those to people in the organization who can use it.

I had the opportunity to meet one-on-one with Andy Oliver, Director of Product Marketing at Lucidworks to drill down on some of these points.

Lucidworks is operationalizing AI for developers who aren't going to understand everything around AI, like how image search works. But they don't need to. Developers need to understand the concepts of AI/ML, NLP, deep learning, supervised and unsupervised learning; as well as know the difference between clustering and classification. However, Lucidworks is providing the classification algorithms.

In addition, in November, Lucidworks is beginning an explainer series, Lucid Thoughts, which will provide a series of two to three-minute videos on AI to help developers with the concepts they need to know. The goal of the series is to bring everyone to a base level understanding of AI, how it can help, and what the potential problems are

Using several tools together is essential for successful AI and search. Developers need to understand the bugs in their code and in society and help fix them. Understand how AI and search fit together and how to debug it.