Combining a BIM student’s two best friends, Beer and Artificial Intelligence

1

October

2018

5/5 (1)

For centuries humankind has been brewing craft beers, which are typically associated with craftmanship and specific skills and knowledge to create the perfect beer. Beer breweries continuously introduce an unending list of different kinds of beers, leaving the consumer to wonder how to make sense out of all these options.

Instead of continuously introducing new beers onto the market, it is now a company’s goal to improve the craft beers that already exist. IntelligentX is the first beer brewery that uses Automated Brewing Intelligence (ABI) to create craft beers that are continuously improved based on consumer feedback.

Programmers transcribe brewer’s intuition and knowledge into code that Artificial Intelligence can understand. Different ingredients and flavors are also added to the Artificial Intelligence system, which allows for all different kinds of craft beers to be created. Moreover, a special code is printed on the bottles that redirects consumers that scan the code to a chatbot which asks for feedback. The chatbot learns which questions to ask and adapts feedback questions accordingly in order to improve the beers. This way the system can learn the taste preferences from different kind of consumers and make appropriate adjustments. ABI has been able to create sixteen different craft beers from four different kind of beer styles.

In my opinion, IntelligentX is a perfect example on how everyday products can be improved by the use of new technologies such as AI. Furthermore, once these kinds of systems can be introduced throughout different industries, this would eliminate many new launched product launches. By integrating the end-consumer into the creation process consumers are more connected to the brand and the products they carry. I believe there is an increasing need for brand and people to talk, AI systems such as ABI can take on this challenge.

The implementation of AI can go much further than just improving beer, therefore, my question to you is in which products or industries do you think similar improvement can be made possible by the introduction of AI? Would you order an IntelligentX beer the next time you are in a bar, why yes or no?

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Will chatbots take over a recruiter’s tasks?

17

September

2018

5/5 (2)

digital-recruitment

The recruitment industry is vastly changing with the introduction of new digital hiring tools, virtual reality (interview) experiences and now also the introduction of the chatbot.

Chatbots are commonly used by ecommerce retailers, but now the recruitment landscape has adopted this new technology into the hiring process. A recruitment chatbots is a software that uses AI technology to understand a person’s messages and know how to respond [1]. These recruitment chatbots are used for the sourcing screening and messaging of candidates.

Time consuming tasks, such as answering FAQ’s, asking screening questions, ranking candidates and scheduling interviews with a human recruiter, can be automated and executed by chatbots rather than human recruiters.  For candidates this allows for easy access to information and a quicker response, whilst recruiters become more productive and can focus on more complex, non-computerized tasks.  Morover, the hiring process can become faster, according to XOR, that developed a recruitment chatbot, the recruitment process can become 33% faster, whilst saving 50% of recruitmtent costs and increasing candidate’s experience [2].

Now this all sounds very promising and you might even ask yourself why not every company has installed such a recruitment chatbot already?

In order for a chatbot to become effective in answering questions human training, supervised learning and a knowledge base are necessary. Learning capabilities also depend on the depth of the technology behind the chatbot. Since humans help train their chatbots, one of the biggest challenges to overcome is that human biases might be passed on to chatbots, as they will be programmed to think like the recruiter [3].

Furthermore, humans have a lack of standardization in texting, meaning that chatbots will not kow how a candidate will react. This means significant time must be invested in order for the system to function, and it still might not respond perfectly.

Personally, I believe chatbots are useful in making the recruiters more productive, since providing information to candidates, scheduling interviews and asking initial questions that might help selecting and ranking candidates, are not the most value adding tasks. However, recruitment is still a very ‘human’ process, as both candidates and companies need to ensure fit with the organization. Completely automating the selection process might result in companies not hiring the right candidates, as human biases and errors are hard to predict for.

Why do you think the introduction of chatbots in recruitment processes has a positive or negative impact? And do you think recruitments chatbots will eventually take over more, if not all, recruiter’s tasks? 

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