AI and Micro-Decisions

- Overview

Your business's use of AI is only going to increase, and that's a good thing. Digitization enables businesses to operate at the atomic level and make millions of decisions every day about a single customer, product, supplier, asset or transaction. But those decisions can't be made by people working in spreadsheets. 

We call these AI-driven fine-grained decisions "micro-decisions." They need a complete paradigm shift, from making decisions to making "decisions about decisions." 

You have to manage at a new level of abstraction with rules, parameters, and algorithms. This shift is happening in every industry and in every kind of decision-making. 

- Micro-Decision and Automation

The nature of micro-decisions requires some degree of automation, especially for real-time and high-volume decisions. 

Automation is enabled by algorithms (rules, predictions, constraints, and logic that determine how to make micro-decisions). And these decision-making algorithms are often described as artificial intelligence (AI). The key question is how human managers manage these types of algorithm-driven systems. 

Autonomous systems are very simple in concept. Imagine a driverless car without a steering wheel. The driver just tells the car where to go and hopes for the best. But once you have the steering wheel, you have a problem. 

You must inform drivers when they may want to intervene, how they can intervene, and how much notice you will give them if intervention is required. You must carefully consider the information you will provide your driver to help them make appropriate interventions.

[More to come ...]