Developers Need to Embrace Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence – Developers must embrace the technology, but how?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making waves. From robots that manage your home life, a la Amazon’s Echo, to smartphones that understand our every word, AI technology is making huge technological leaps – and fast. 

This year alone, Qualcomm has announced the Zeroth platform, the company’s first cognitive computing platform designed to create intuitive, natural digital interactions between consumers and their smartphones, while Google announced Google Now On-Tap, an upgrade to their smartphone voice technology featuring contextual awareness, reducing the error rate of Google Voice to less than eight percent.

This is all culminating in the potential for increased artificial intelligence capabilities for smartphones. The question now becomes, as smartphones get smarter, how will increased capabilities affect the digital experience? How can developers and enterprises keep up with the faster, smarter mobile devices of the future?

The key to being ready to take on more advanced technology while maintaining your digital experience is staying ahead of the curve and in front of your competitors.

By keeping track of up-to-date user information and monitoring key performance indicators, it is easier to integrate apps into ever-evolving mobile operating systems and ultimately to take advantage of increased personalization. Increasingly, brands and developers alike are seeing localization and personalization as driving factors behind app usage, but both of those things require contextual awareness, which can be enabled through AI software implementation.

What exactly should be monitored? The following is a great starting point:

- How is the app reacting to the addition of new, more labor-intensive features? If performance suffers enough, it can cost organizations customers. Be sure when adding new features to analyze potential sources of latency and determine which features are actually necessary or will add substantial value to the customer experience.

- What can be done to prevent lag time or delays for the end user? Think holistically about the design and user experience. “Budget” time when designing how the ideal customer would navigate the new capabilities and do not waver if that budget is exceeded. Also, analytics can be useful, but determine if it is necessary as it can slow down or affect the performance of features, for instance a geolocated coupon.

- Which layer is causing the most delay? Can this be improved? Isolate various variables to determine that most notable impacts to performance.

Ensuring the end-user experience is as positive as possible should be the goal of the entire development team, from vision to delivery. Additionally, being aware of what consumers are doing in your app will give you insight into what features you need to build out further and what you can scrap, ensuring that there are no loose ends or opportunities for poor performance.

This is where having access to a great mobile analytics platform can really help out. With data available advising what works and what doesn’t, brands can more readily anticipate surges in users and build in load balancing infrastructure to ensure that even with unexpected spikes in users or slow-downs in bandwidth, smart apps won’t suffer any delays or hiccups.

Going beyond strictly performance metrics, the ability to pivot quickly can give teams a competitive advantage when it comes to embracing the newest technology, jumping on a feature a competitor just introduced, or creating something entirely new. With analytics in place, monitoring software and agile development strategies deployed across the organization, business is set up for success.

The benefits of delivering contextually aware, hyper smart solutions to customers are a no brainer. Not only does the application undoubtedly serve a more useful purpose to the end user, it can also make the full user experience more rich and adaptive. That feeling consumers have when things “just work” is one of the characteristics of almost every successful product. Akin to the saying “keep it simple, stupid” comes the idea that when technology is introduced to consumers, the experience should be seamless.

Departing from the consumer mindset, applications with AI functionality also provide significant business benefits, primarily with reference to automation. By removing tedious internal processes, more time is given back to employees to do the job they were actually hired to do.

The future is here; developers and organizations need to be prepared for the fast-paced advancement of mobile technology in order to stay relevant.