Artificial intelligence is a big deal at the moment, no pun intended. So far this year, venture capitalists have invested $7.6 billion in artificial intelligence tech, according to PitchBook Data. That is close to double the $4 billion they dropped on AI deals just two years ago. What face-melting, futuristic technologies can we expect from these billions spent on research and development? Actually, they may just be easier and more intuitive user interfaces for tech we already have.

“The AI concept is really just about creating usability,” said Maribel Lopez (pictured), founder and principal analyst at Lopez Research LLC.

This is not to downplay the complexity of AI or the value of usability. A knob or dial too many can make the difference between an otherwise genius technology sitting on a developer’s shelf or flying off store shelves. “That was or used to be the hallmark of Apple,” Lopez said.

Apple Inc. built its brand by outfitting complicated tech with easy interfaces that users loved. Now complexity seems to be getting the best of even Apple’s deft engineers, Lopez said during an interview at the Samsung Developer Conference in San Francisco. She spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. 

“So how do we get this back to … we can use the stuff that we already have built?” Lopez asked.

This week, theCUBE spotlights Maribel Lopez in our Guest of the Week feature.

AI eats big data

The stuff we’ve already built includes massive data reserves. While touted as the key to digital business, big data is proving too much for traditional compute to swallow, crunch and spit out as insight or suggestions. It gets worse when the form and content of exploding big data is taken into account. Most experts agree that about 80 percent of the world’s data is unstructured. This can include content such as Twitter messages and images from satellites. Understanding all of this data is difficult to imagine without the aid of machine learning, deep learning and AI.

Likewise, training on these mountains of data is what make algorithms intelligent. “Even though AI technologies have existed for several decades, it’s the explosion of data — the raw material of AI — that has allowed it to advance at incredible speeds,” big data expert Bernard Marr wrote in a Forbes article in July. This is why big data and AI are increasingly bundled in a single conversation, according to Lopez.

“Big data is now machine learning and AI — which is the natural evolution of it,” she said.

An experience world

But end users don’t care about big data or deep learning — they just want Spotify to play stuff they like. “It is an experience world, and I think that’s been the problem with technology adoption to date — you can’t figure out how to use it,” Lopez said. This is why application developers and user interface designers have latched onto AI.

“The big news in all the [conferences] that we go to now is AI and machine learning — that terms is just everywhere,” Lopez said.

The role of developers is changing and encompassing more as users demand cross-compatible apps. How can an application transfer from home to work to the commute and everywhere in between? With a facile user interface powered by AI. “When we think of DevOps, what we think about is creating better application experiences that can know you, that can respond to you,” Lopez said.

Spouting off smart stuff

Deep infrastructure discussions were lacking at the Samsung Developer Conference, according to Lopez. Instead, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd seems to be focusing on the user experience with Bixby, the AI assistant built into the Galaxy S8 smartphone (and soon TVs and refrigerators).

Samsung is also trying to unify the disjointed jumble of devices and clouds that bog down consumers and enterprises, Lopez explained. “They’re trying to make moves that can work across the board now — trying to make a cloud that can be secure for your consumer things but can also be up leveled if you want to make it an ‘enterprise of things’ cloud,” she said.

The company is well positioned in that it is at least offering products that can be used and connected across Samsung, if not the whole tech universe, Lopez added. These include both smart home and enterprise mobile offerings. 

Samsung and others have their work cut out for them in leveraging AI to cut out complexity from existing technologies. For example, consumer “internet of things” devices are still “an absolute disaster,” Lopez said. We shall see if AI’s usability magic can come to the rescue there, as well.

“The next big evolution of technology isn’t necessarily about creating a new thing — it’s about being able to use the thing,” Lopez concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Samsung Developer Conference.

Photo: SiliconANGLE