We are living in an era of disruption. Everything around us is getting disrupted. Industrial automation and transformation are taking place and SMEs are slowly establishing their brand. A monopoly in business is dying down and anyone with the right strategy and products can enjoy a share of the revenue.
Buzzwords like AI, ML and more are still unclear in tech for many people, but there is no getting away from the fact that AI and ML are heavily dependent on the huge amount of data. There are numerous predictions of data analytics and how it is going to shape AI and ML in the coming years.
The rise of AI is inevitable and upon us. From SIRI to Alexa to ELSA to self-driving cars, the way that AI is evolving is changing human characteristics and behaviour to another level.
Despite all the panic going around of how AI and robots will be taking over human jobs in the future, no one can argue with the fact that AI in business and everyday life is becoming more of an enabler than a disruptor.
After decades of experiencing a slow burn, artificial intelligence innovation has caught fire to become the hottest item on the agendas of the world’s top technology firms.
In today’s day and age advancement of AI would not have been possible without the joining of three forces that create the right equation for the growth of AI:
- Rise of big data
- Strong graphics processing units (GPUs) for complex computations
- Deep learning
Currently, we’re only scratching the surface of what the three forces above can do together, but it’s never too early to look beyond the trio.
Whether we realize or like it or not, AI is all around us and playing an active part in our daily lives. It is influencing the way we live, interact and improve customer experience. I believe there is a lot more to come in the near future with more improvements, development, and governance.
2019 saw AI innovations that allowed higher levels of personalization, productivity, and creativity. Looking into 2020 and beyond, I believe AI will continue to shape business and Customer Experience in significant ways.
According to me 2020 and beyond should see the below innovations being worked on to make things around us more accessible and affordable:
- AI will make healthcare more accurate and less costly
- AI will become less data-hungry
- AI will lead to an improvement in the accuracy and efficiency of neural networks
- AI in Automation
- AI in manufacturing
- AI in drug discovery
- AI in government which will influence Geo-Political conversations and scenarios
- AI in Energy & Utility
- AI in BFSI
- AI in Travel & Hospitality
- AI in Autonomous Vehicles
- AI in Blockchain
In order for us to achieve the above innovations of any kind we as a nation and mankind need to address the following macro-level challenges being faced:
- Lack of broad-based expertise in research and application of AI
- Absence of enabling data ecosystems – access to intelligent data
- High resource cost and low awareness for adoption of AI
- Privacy and security, including a lack of formal regulations around privacy of data
- Absence of a collaborative approach to adoption and application of AI
In 2020 the below are the AI trends I am keeping a keen eye on:
- Healthcare: Increased access and affordability of quality healthcare
- Agriculture: Uptick in farmers income with increased farm productivity and reduction of wastage
- Education: Affordability and Accessibility of quality of education
- Smart Cities and Infrastructure: Efficient connectivity for the urban and rural population
- Smart Mobility and Transportation: Smarter and Safer modes of transportation to better manage traffic and congestion.
In the current landscape, I believe that each one has to chart their path. In today’s day and age with digital tools, speed, accuracy, data computation, and accessibility I see businesses of all types benefiting from AI.
While AI is heavily being applied and used in consumer applications, businesses are beginning to adopt it across their operations, at times with striking results.
AI can be used to improve business performance in areas like:
- Predictive maintenance, where deep learning will be used to analyse large amounts of data from audio and images to effectively detect positives or negatives in factory assembly lines
- In logistics, AI can optimize the routing of delivery traffic, improving fuel efficiency and reducing delivery times
- In customer service, AI is helping call centres through improved speech recognition
- In sales, AI is helping by combining customer demographic and historical transaction data with social media to generate personalized recommendations
AI is changing the way we do business today. One of the main reasons for this is that AI can process information in a significantly smaller amount of time than humans; hence there is no surprise that it is affecting the way decisions are made.
AI is already shaking up the way traditional business processes are carried out, from streamlining innovation to improving efficiency across a wide range of fields. The effects of AI will be echoed louder in the coming decade, as virtually every industry will transform its core processes and business models to take advantage of AI and ML. Currently, the way I see, the bottlenecks are imagination, implementation, and management. For businesses, it is vital to get a plan for making AI work within the organization.
Initially, it may lead to projects getting delayed or under-delivered, but the risk of businesses becoming non-competitive by ignoring AI is high and because of this I am seeing more and more companies striving towards building an AI / Data Computing first organization to build their strategies, lower operations cost and increase revenue.
