Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Allied Universal CIO Mark Mullison (Part 3)

Mark Mullison: What was so exciting to us is that the AI engine not only decided to deal with the cafeteria at lunch and the trips on the loading dock, but also with the laptop thefts in the lab. It went one step further. It understood not only to check the lab for suspicious activities, but it also recommended that the security professionals check all of the access points close to that lab for security policy violations.

It understood that security policy violations precede crime. Safety policy violations precede accidents. When we saw this, we got so excited. We thought, “This thing is really smart.” Examples of issues that have been fixed are as varied as the sorts of conditions that might be witnessed in the data.

The other exciting thing about this is that it’s clustering information together across many sites and learning from datasets that are much larger than you might ever experience in a single site. It’s really these two big things that are driving the reduction.

Sramana Mitra: What is the level of adoption of this kind of technology in your client base or in the industry in general?

Mark Mullison: The clients are extremely happy about it. The feedback that we get by and large is that they’re very excited by the capabilities and very encouraged with the results that the technology is delivering. It’s been uniformly a success.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of customers are adopting?

Mark Mullison: Allied Universal has clients ranging from top global 100 companies to small local businesses. We’ve got phenomenal clients in all sorts of industry sectors. 

Sramana Mitra: Where do you see adoption trends that are significant? Are there hotspots where there is more adoption?

Mark Mullison: For this application, no. Everybody is interested in reducing crimes and accidents. Everybody is interested in driving down safety and security incidents. They get interested for different reasons. They have different goals that are important to them.

Healthcare might be very interested in things that impact the bed fill rate. Logistics companies are often very interested in operating efficiencies. We can help with that. There’s no particular uptake in one industry segment over the other because it’s a general-purpose application which is all about reducing safety and security incidents. That’s something that matters to everybody.

Sramana Mitra: What about open problems from where you sit? 

Mark Mullison: Where an awful lot of value can be created is in creating AI that is not only smart like humans, but that is also smart with humans. A lot of people talk about machines versus people. In certain circumstances, that may be the case.

There are some things that machines do better than people. That’s just the way it’s going to go. An awful lot of things are going to require people and machines to work together. To the extent people can be creative and understand how to create an ecosystem where people work efficiently with the machines, that’s where there’s an awful lot of value is being created. I think we’ve just started to scratch the surface on that.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Allied Universal CIO Mark Mullison
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