AI is Both Business Enabler and Business Disruptor

It seems you can’t survey the business technology landscape in 2019 without seeing breathtaking vistas featuring artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.  After years of hype or fear-mongering, now (finally) the AI conversation is turning to real-world, practical applications that hold great promise for increasing business productivity, and creating new products and services.  At the same time, AI presents daunting challenges to some existing businesses and business models.

Consider market and competitive intelligence (CI) research, for example. In their quest for automated insights, organizations want their AI-enabled search engine to have unfettered access to the largest, most robust, broadest, and most authoritative content sets. They don’t care if individual users have direct access to the underlying documents, however, which challenges content publishers’ business models that in many cases are dependent upon individual users reading individual documents.

What does this do to a premium content provider’s subscriber base, content licensing revenue, and advertising revenue stream? How does it affect a firm’s intellectual property rights? What are the copyright implications of getting “answers” based on automated analyses of documents instead of providing links to documents? What is the meaning of a content license when the content is analyzed by a machine, the intelligence consolidated with informational bits from other publishers, and answers given directly without the need to ever download a document to a user? What changes are required to licensing and subscription models of the future to deal with these issues?

For answers, read David Seuss’ article, “Barbarians at the Gate: AI and Copyright on a Collision Course,” in EContent magazine.