Expert Systems: Benefits to End Users

Primarily, the benefits of Expert Systems to end users include:

• A speed-up of human professional or semi-professional work -- typically by a factor of ten and sometimes by a factor of a hundred or more.
• Within companies, major internal cost savings. For small systems, savings are sometimes in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars; but for large systems, often in the tens of millions of dollars and as high as hundreds of millions of dollars. These cost savings are a result of quality improvement, a major motivation for employing expert system technology.
• Improved quality of decision making. In some cases, the quality or correctness of decisions evaluated after the fact show a ten-fold improvement.
• Preservation of scarce expertise. Expert Systems are used to preserve scarce know-how in organizations, to capture the expertise of individuals who are retiring, and to preserve corporate know-how so that it can be widely distributed to other factories, offices or plants of the company.
• Introduction of new products. A good example of a new product is a pathology advisor sold to clinical pathologists in hospitals to assist in the diagnosis of diseased tissue.