Page 163 - Artificial Intelligence for the Internet of Everything

The Value of Information and the Internet of Things 149

(Vermesan et al., 2017). Moreover, the machine learning and intelligence in
the IoT provides systems with user, ambient, and social awareness, and
enables a wide range of innovative applications (Guo et al., 2013). Beyond
the volumes of information the IoT provides, the collective intelligence it
manifest represents a new form of information-driven value (de Castro
Neto & Santo, 2012).
The elicitation of value through the use of machine learning is not a new
phenomenon (Dean, 2014). However, the IoT is transformative because it
combines embedded machine learning, and thus collective intelligence,
with an exponential ubiquity of devices, vast amounts and variety of data,
and an ability to provide virtual interfaces to physical objects that can act
on the real world. In this manner, advances in machine learning and AI will
complement the technological capability of IoT and significantly impact of
many facets of the traditional value chain (Kaplan, 1984). Contrast modern
organizations’ exploitation of the intelligent IoT with the historical perspec-
tive of 1997 research (Plant & Murrell, 1997) that casts AI as:

The ultimate enabler of [organizational] agility through technology is the artificial
intelligent component. AI demands greater organizational internal understanding
of technology and thus is only applicable to mature organizations that have inter-
nally streamlined processes and a high degree of connectivity.
This view of the future from 1997 speaks to the sophistication of most mod-
ern organizations and the impact that more timely and accurate information
sharing has on increasing interest in the VoI. Moreover, in narrow domains
specific AI techniques that target the predictability of information insights
necessary for profit generation, for example, the supply-chain, have proven
quantitative measures of value and its relationship to the insights delivered
(Lumsden & Mirzabeiki, 2008).
It is interesting to consider how AI itself will have to make VoI deter-
minations relative to tasked goals and objectives. This is because the AI will
be responsible for ensuring the automation of a variety of tasks and execution
of services. Particularly in a collectively intelligent IoT setting, AI necessarily
must make decisions that adapt local behaviors to accommodate global mis-
sions and dynamics. From this perspective, the decisions that both humans
and AI make utilizing IoT information and processes must do so by focusing
on the information itself rather than on technology, as the real carrier of
value (Glazer, 1993). Glazer’s research both (1) reiterates our earlier point
that information itself is difficult and contextual to define in a value context,