Mobile and Cloud are ubiquitous. Chances are, you have a mobile device within reach and in your daily life, you use a Cloud based service. Mobile is the “first screen." Cloud, more specifically, Cloud Native, when it comes to ease of provisioning, set up, use, flexibility, extensibility, security, maintenance – and building on the growing trends in API first, Microservices, and Functions, the Cloud technology and economic model is an easy call. 

 

Mobile and Cloud have come together to change the landscape

 

 

So what’s next? While mobile is the "first screen," messaging apps are dominant apps used on those screens, and Artificial Intelligence, e.g. intelligent chatbots, is the new interfaces – or maybe even no screen at all, but instead, voice interfaces. Hey Siri, who is Alan Turing? John McCarthy?

Alan Turing asked“Can machines think?” in his 1950  paper, Computing Machinery and Intelligence

John McCarthy, coined Artificial Intelligence at the first AI research conference at Dartmouth College

 

Artificial Intelligence or simply “AI” is the next big shift in technology. I'll tread carefully because historically, AI’s been emerging since the fifties but the compute power wasn’t yet there and the science needed to mature through a few “AI winters." Now thanks to many brilliant minds and exponential growth in compute power (Moore’s law), this time, it's the dawn of the AI era. Serious breakthroughs have occurred and the time between AI milestones is shrinking.

 

A few examples:

 

1997, Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov, grandmaster World Chess Champion.  (Ok – an 8×8 grid. Not surprising. What about Go? The complexity is magnitudes greater.
2016 AlphaGo’s Deep Mind beats Lee Sedol, the world’s grandmaster Go champion.  A decisive win with creative moves Mr. Sedol and the Go community had never seen. 

 

 

 

But Chess and Go are games with “perfect information.” What about imperfect games where some information is hidden? Like poker. Surely, human intuition has an edge?

 

 

 

 a

Jan 2017, Carnagie Mellon’s Libratus poker bot beats 4 of the world’s best professional poker players, heads up, no-limit Texas Holdem. The win was decisive.

Games with imperfect information… Ouch.

 

 

 

The milestones are impressive, but I think we have some time before singularity and I'm not ready to be a house cat to the AI overlords. The Luddite option isn't right either. Let’s look near term and narrow these topics to the business of the enterprise where we will all need to step up our game!

 

Messaging Intelligent Chatbots

 

 

Messaging apps are the most common way for people to communicate with each other, and it is becoming more common (and preferable) to communicating with businesses. Messaging is the latest interface to reach everyone because it’s natural. Mobile apps are great, but the mobile home screen can only fit so many apps. Since messaging apps are popular (WhatsApp, WeChat, Kik, FB Messenger, etc.) automated, intelligent chatbots, offer a way to establishing a scalable, natural conversation between humans and businesses, while at the same time, increasing quality, consistency and response times. Chatbots are not at the stage of passing the Turing test, and replace the ability for humans to work on complex problems, but instead, offload simple to moderately complex inquiries automatically – freeing expert staff to work on complex questions.  

 

Without a doubt, Mobile, Cloud and AI/chatbots are in your future. Whether you will be driving or following is up to you. You’ll want an open, flexible environment that is secure, scalable and intelligent, from a trusted & proven partner.  Oracle is the leader in SaaS, PaaS and IaaS,  and is “all in.”

 

To learn more about Oracle's mobile, cloud and AI/chatbot development:

 

 

 

 

 

  • Oracle Code: A 20 cities, worldwide tour built for developers. Get hands on experience with Oracle’s Cloud Native, Mobile and Open Source adoptions. Technical presentations and hands on labs. And please visit developer.oracle.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

Quickly! Before our AI overlords take over, follow us @OracleMobile and to join the Oracle Mobile conversation on LinkedIn.

 

  • Larry Ellison introducing intelligent chatbots at the 2016 Oracle OpenWorld keynote and stay tuned for more exciting announcements.

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