JAKARTA, KOMPAS — Since last year, the use of artificial intelligence in various sectors has increased. Almost all decisions rely on artificial intelligence. The most significant impact is the need of big data.
Smartphones provide massive data, such as texts, photos, videos, voice, maps and others, and they recognize the pattern of human activities and needs. This data is useful for the development of artificial intelligence. Until last year, the number of internet users, according to the Indonesian Internet Service Providers Association, stood at 132.7 million, 67.8 percent of which accessed the internet through smartphones.
Daily Social CEO Rama Mamuaya in Jakarta last week said smartphones provided huge amounts of data when the gadgets were in use, while personal computer users provided minimal data.
“Each activity, from the movement of an individual captured by GPS, the access of the internet to communications via social media and others, is data that is very useful in developing artificial intelligence,” Rama said.
He said data about the interaction between consumers and producers could be used to make answer patterns with the use of artificial intelligence. A company that provided customer services in Jakarta that did not use artificial intelligence would need 200 employees. With artificial intelligence it would only need to employ 30 people.
“The inquiries from the customers via email or a patterned conversation system, such as a question about a product, schedule and others, would be answered by the system using artificial intelligence,” he said.
Daily Social uses artificial intelligence to deal with press releases from various companies to appear on their product. It used to employ journalists to handle 10-20 press releases. Now, with artificial intelligence, the company only needs two or three press releases that need confirmation or rewrites. Artificial intelligence has the ability to extract press releases and use them to write up proper news articles.
Bahaso CEO Tyovan Ari Widagdo said artificial intelligence had been used massively since last year. He was developing a start-up centering on language lessons using artificial intelligence to create the learning module for students. The response of the students will automatically lead them to the suitable module.
“We are also developing an app that allows users to practice a foreign language. We are in a trial period. These are just the beginning stages. The robots will become smarter with more training. Voice will be worked on next,” he said.
KoinWorks CEO Benedicto Haryono said artificial intelligence was used in many sectors to help make decisions (machine-aided decisions). KoinWords is a financial technology company that provides loans. “In total, there are 16 use case using machine learning in KoinWorks. The number will increase,” he said.
Several uses of artificial intelligence in KoinWorks are financial crime detection, credit ratings and optimum character recognition to speed up document reading. By using artificial intelligence, the fintech company is no longer using documents used by conventional banks to trace the track record of potential debtors.
Bukalapak engineer vice president Ibrahim Arief said he had also been using artificial intelligence since last year. Artificial intelligence was used for predictive modeling. By using it, Bukalapak could recognize the performance of users.
“We still have around six projects that use big data or artificial intelligence. Until now, we trust the skills of the local engineers. In total, we have 150 big data or artificial intelligence engineers and we plan to recruit 70 more in the near future,” Ibrahim said.
Grab head of product Jerald Singh said his company used artificial intelligence in each city to track the behavior of drivers and passengers.
Need for big data
The growing need of artificial intelligence requires big data. PT Gojek Indonesia chief marketing officer Piotr Jakubowski said his company used data as the basis of all decisions, either in operational, marketing or product division. “We have a special team to deal with big data and analyze it,” Piotr added.
Tyovan said all future decisions would depend on big data. Meanwhile, Ibrahim Arief said the use of big data in Bukalapak was in the form of information about the items most liked or most searched by customers. Bukalapak had earlier collected data of its customers and analyzed them. When customers accessed the website again, the big data technology would direct them to items of their preference or need.
“Despite this, we guarantee data safety and concerns about privacy. Before any transaction, we will show the terms and conditions to get approval from the customers. All of the data belongs to Bukalapak and will not be sold to others,” he said.
