Dive Brief:

• Machine intelligence (MI), not artificial intelligence (AI), represents the "next chapter in the advanced analytics journey," according to a new report from Deloitte.

• Deloitte refers to MI as "algorithmic capabilities" that allow for improvement in employee performance, workload automation, and allow for the development of cognitive agents to help with human thinking an engagement. AI, however, is just a small part of the larger MI movement. It's a segment of the overall increased analytics efforts in technology, but AI's capabilities perform tasks that normally require only human levels of intelligence. 

• Deloitte predicts spending on various aspects of MI will reach nearly $31.3 billion by 2019, with MI use cases taking off rapidly over the next 18 to 24 months.

Dive Insight:

Sure, AI tends to get all the media attention, but according to Deloitte, AI is "only one part of a larger, more compelling set of developments in the realm of cognitive computing." The real benefit from intelligence technology involves progressing beyond human limitations. 

MI is the bigger story. The firm explored a number of use cases already in play, like a financial services company using MI to follow up on a sales lead, qualify them and sustain the lead without requiring human interaction. 

Deloitte expects MI to enable businesses to benefit from cognitive insights, engagement and automation over the next several years. Think of it like Amazon’s Alexa, but for a business environment and including the ability to automate your work and enable insights you’ve never had access to before so you can perform more advanced and meaningful work.

One of the main points of MI is that it's technology that can greatly expand on human capabilities. For example, cognitive assistants can handle "up to 27,000 conversations simultaneously and in dozens of spoken languages."