It seems like every day there is a new article or story about artificial intelligence (AI). AI is going to take over all of the jobs. AI is going to do all of the repetitive, menial tasks carried out by admins on a daily basis. AI is going to rise up and take over. AI is not going to take over but instead be natively baked into all systems to produce more human interactions, AI is going to ...
For all the things AI is allegedly going to do, it can already do a lot right now, such as automation, custom searches, security interventions, analysis and prediction on data, serve as a digital assistant, perform algorithm-based machine learning and more.
It will be a good number of years before we get AI doing everything for us, but what can we do in the meantime? What can we do today? How do we take advantage or be poised to take advantage of AI? How do we get our technology landscapes in order so we are ready?
Here are five things you should consider before getting involved with AI:
1. Get Current And Stay Current
If we think about what AI will do for staying current, it will handle things we struggle with -- patching, updates, compliance, setting adjustments to meet baselines. In order to use AI to do these tasks, to rid yourself of these mundane things and to pass the buck to your eager, hungry army of AI workers, you have to be on platforms that are ready to receive these items. If your environment is made up of Windows 7, Server 2003 on physical devices, VB apps and individual IIS servers for individual apps, then maybe you shouldn’t be focusing on AI.
This, on the surface, has a simple solution: Get up to date on everything. The best way to prepare for the AI age is to simply get what’s existing up to date so you can leverage AI right away -- and that's not just for security patches. That means adopting the latest operating systems, firmware and latest apps from vendors. Once you're in a position in which AI can take over, this entire notion of staying current will go away and the machines can do the work in the weeds.
