When Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor stated, “For most purposes, a man with a machine is better than a man without a machine,” I’m sure he wouldn’t have thought those words would still hold true as we enter the Fourth Industrial Revolution. A true pioneer of his time, Ford understood the business advantage of harnessing technology to revolutionize the manufacturing process. By making the assembly line move and assigning fixed stations to employees, he reduced the time it took to build a car from 12 hours to two hours and 30 minutes. As a result, the Model T Ford became first car that was affordable to everyday people.

Today, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) we can apply a similar logic to how man and machine can work side by side. AI is better equipped to handle and analyze large amounts of data, find patterns and answers to questions all in a very short amount of time. Human intelligence excels at empathy, creativity and in finding the right questions to ask. That is why I believe the most successful companies will be those that embrace this distinction and find a symbiotic approach to unlocking how man and machine come together to produce the best possible outcomes for businesses.

Three real-life examples

Carlsberg creates 1,000 different beer samples each day at its research laboratory in Denmark. An impossible amount of beer tasting each day for the staff in the lab if it weren’t for technology. Using AI, Carlsberg launched ‘The Beer Fingerprinting Project,’ which uses a series of high-tech sensors to accurately measure the delicate nuances and aromas in beer; effectively creating a ‘flavor fingerprint’ for each beer sample. This information is then passed onto the lab technicians who use it to create new beers at a much higher speed than before, giving the brewer a distinct competitive advantage. In fact, the company estimates the technology could cut development time by 30 percent.

Demonstrating how technology can be effectively deployed to free up employees time is UK mapping agency Ordnance Survey . Knowing that people who own properties with flat roofs can be charged more for their insurance due to potential problems with sagging or water damage, they turned to AI image recognition technology. In the time it takes one person to correctly identify different types of roofs in a single image, the AI algorithm can process thousands of images. At the same time, accuracy is improved and the historical five per cent error rate average removed, saving those who have pitched roofs money on their home insurance policy. The new approach also gives surveyors more time to focus on complex tasks as such high-level decision making and judgement calls that only they can make.

Nowhere are the advantages of man and machine working together more evident than in the medical field. Radiologists are experts at looking at an image and being able to spot if a tumor is present. But when it comes to figuring out whether a treatment is working or not, it’s a lot harder. This is where machine learning and computer vision can really have an impact. Project InnerEye is working on a system that evaluates 3D scans pixel by pixel to tell radiologists exactly how much a tumor has grown, shrunk or changed shape since the last scan, allowing them to make better treatment decisions for their patients.

Radiologist Dr. Hugh Harvey welcomes AI with open arms, “Where radiology Artificial Intelligence is heading toward is digital augmentation of radiologists, to the point at which their job becomes to monitor and assess machine outputs, rather than manually go through every possible mundane finding as they do now.”

When bringing man AND machine together to drive business growth, I believe a core set of principles must be applied:

AI must augment human ingenuity, not replace it -- innovation, creativity and collaboration in a business is often the result of intelligent technology combined with human intelligence.

AI must be transparent -- all employees must understand the technology and how it can work for them.

AI must have accountability – so employees can monitor how it is working and be able to adjust it at any time.