A transition is taking place at the highest levels of business. For the first time, conversations are not about optimization and efficiency — they are about intelligence. Corporations are looking beyond bottom-line efficiency gains from business intelligence or artificial intelligence, and they’re searching for new horizons for change. Think of it as the conversation shifting from pain to gain. Unanimously, these businesses seem to believe in the concept of transformation, using artificial intelligence and extending human intelligence. The new focus is not on the data but on the system that distributes executive intelligence.

When we launched Aera Technology, we took a gamble talking about concepts we feel strongly about, particularly cognitive automation.

So, let’s unpack this idea.

Cognitive Automation

The hardest part of extending human intelligence in an organization is capturing and digitizing human decision making models. Human experience is a starting point for machines to first mimic and then to begin to understand evaluation criteria for future possible actions. Cognitive automation comes from the ability to map how humans manage both known and unknown conditions — where their decision models evolve as new information becomes known.

For example, millions of hours of driver decision making had to be modeled to make self-driving cars feasible. And still, sometimes the car can be autonomous and sometimes it still does not know what to do. Similarly, training a cognitive automation system requires mapping human decisions in context. Helpfully, cognitive neuroscience provides a guide for cognitive automation in the enterprise.

Executive Function

The question is, what part of intelligence is the most valuable? There are vibrant, active debates about what intelligence is, but we see it as ranging from basic learning and automation (think robotic process automation) to executive function. Executive function consists of being able to deal with a complex issue, often with conflicting needs and data and to generate options through logic, rationality, causal analysis and experience. Our view is that the apex of intelligence is executive function.