Last Tuesday, Howest and VOKA invited us to host a workshop at Barco's headquarters. About forty entrepreneurs and lecturers came together to see how artificial intelligence can improve their business or organization.

Every year the managers of Amazon have to write a six-page memo in which they lay out their business plan. One of the questions that’s always returning, is how they’ll implement machine learning in their work. It’s not just the technology manager who has to answer this question, but all of them, as machine learning impacts every part of the organization.

Diverge and converge

To find the most suitable machine learning application for the companies at the event, we used the principle of design thinking. First, we diverge and come up with a lot of ideas, and then keep the best ideas through convergence.

To take that first step, we developed the ‘AI The Game’ card game. The players are each assigned a role (CTO, CEO, employee...) and must defend their AI application for the board of directors. They can come up with that application based on the cards in the game. There are 32 Task cards, each with an application that helps machine learning. Computer Vision, for instance, or text-to-speech.

'I found the card game of In The Pocket enjoyable and inspiring. It is a well executed method that will help your team explore concepts with AI and machine learning that could help your business.'    

Frederik Vandecasteele, Innovation Manager Voka

They can then use the 10 Value cards to check how valuable it is to develop an AI application for a specific problem. Is it a solution for one person or the entire company? And is it a difficult task, or something that an intern could arrange?

These are questions that are also emerging in our AI Value Canvas, the tool used in the convergence phase. This toolkit helps you crystallize your needs, and avoid technical discussion about neural networks.

The ideas

In total ten ideas - one for each group - emerged during our workshop at Barco. One group invented a voice generated guide for Plopsaland. Maya De Bij, one of the animation characters, would be able to pronounce your name, and give personalised information based on their location and personality.

A legal firm wanted to use Voice ID for fraud detection so they could check whether the person who’s calling for more information on a specific case is who he’s claiming to be. The lecturers of Howest came up with a concept in which churn prediction was used to analyze which students will need extra support.

The winner of the evening developed a tool that can be used in international meetings. We can often translate certain statements literally, but too little attention is paid to emotions. With the application that was conceived, that would be a thing of the past!

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