Earlier this year I was invited to join and present at the AI Forum in Moscow. As the topic was of course AI, I couldn’t help but notice that people in the audience were checking emails and messages minutes before the event started. And it got me thinking about “Intelligence” – were people at this forum using AI to boost their work efficiency? (Also, I was looking for a ‘hook’ to start my presentation, and this seemed to be a good one.)

So when it was my turn to speak, I asked who in the audience had activated an “Out of Office” assistant in their email systems – the ones that tell everyone that you’re temporarily unable to read or reply to messages and may give senders your colleague or assistant’s contact details for anything urgent.

A show of hands showed that the majority of the audience had indeed done this.

Then I asked how many were reading their messages and replying to them anyway. Again, the show of hands gave away that the majority were doing exactly that, making their Out of Office messages somewhat redundant.

So I mentioned that maybe this is quite a smart way to handle our daily activities and bring in some continuity in our office communications, right? Having an Out of Office message. The audience, I could see, confirmed and nodded.

I also noted that it’s actually quite “artificial”, too. Especially when the majority of people read their messages and reply, regardless of directing message senders to a colleague.

A Smarter Way: Activating Intelligence

It got me thinking that perhaps a better way would be a more proactive detection method whereby your devices could detect that you’re not in the office or at your desk, and automatically activate and set the services we require for our daily activities and continuity in office communications.

To me, that would be much more intelligent and far less artificial.

It’s predicted that by 2025, we will see an uptake of 40 billion personal smart devices and 90% of device users will have a smart digital assistant. Data utilization will reach 86% and AI services will be readily available, as prevalent as the air we breathe. AI will become a new general purpose technology and will change all industries and organizations.

In my presentation I continued talking about AI and how perhaps it makes more sense to think of it as an element that can be “activated”. Activating Intelligence would then mean devices behave more like a digital assistant that helps improve management and efficiency across industries and usage scenarios.

It could, for example, make network O&M more efficient. And true intelligence in consumer devices would make them smarter and work more intuitively than ever.

Activating Intelligence would assist and support with computing power for all organizations – especially businesses and governments – and help them activate and utilize that intelligence with greater ease.

Activated intelligence would mean that you wouldn’t have to manually configure an Out of Office assistant and bother an assistant or colleague to act on your behalf if a given matter is urgent that you’ll reply to anyway – your personal assistant would do the grunt work for you based on your schedule, location, and work priorities. Click the links to find out more about Huawei’s digital work practices and the Activate Intelligence concept that underpins our AI strategy and portfolio