This book deals with artificial intelligence (AI) and its several
applications. It is not an organic text that should be read from the
first page onwards, but rather a collection of articles that can be read
at will (or at need). The idea of this work is indeed to provide some
food for thoughts on how AI is impacting few verticals (insurance and
financial services), affecting horizontal and technical applications
(speech recognition and blockchain), and changing organizational
structures (introducing new figures or dealing with ethical issues).
The structure of the chapter is very similar, so I hope the reader won't
find difficulties in establishing comparisons or understanding the
differences between specific problems AI is being used for. The first
chapter of the book is indeed showing the potential and the achievements
of new AI techniques in the speech recognition domain, touching upon the
topics of bots and conversational interfaces. The second and thirds
chapter tackle instead verticals that are historically data-intensive
but not data-driven, i.e., the financial sector and the insurance one.
The following part of the book is the more technical one (and probably
the most innovative), because looks at AI and its intersection with
another exponential technology, namely the blockchain. Finally, the last
chapters are instead more operative, because they concern new figures to
be hired regardless of the organization or the sector, and ethical and
moral issues related to the creation and implementation of new type of
algorithms.
