Artificial intelligence has been a big buzzword for companies across all sectors and fills our media with new and amazing ways AI is impacting our lives. It has helped improve sales, efficiency and business processes.
But just what is artificial intelligence? At its simplest level, AI enables machines to “perform human-like tasks.” AI is more than this, however. It also allows these machines to learn from their experiences and adapt to new and changing environments.
Machines get better at human-like activities as time goes by. AI does this by gathering and processing massive amounts of data to identify patterns and direct appropriate actions. Perhaps the most notable example we hear about daily is the self-driving car.
Other examples abound, and it is not an exaggeration to say that AI is transforming our industrial world.
A little history
The phrase artificial intelligence was first heard during the 1950s, when people tasked early computers with simple problem solving. The U.S. Department of Defense, in the 1960s, did the first serious work with AI by programming computers to simulate the basics of human reasoning.
DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, undertook street mapping during the 1970s using AI. DARPA had developed Siri-like personal assistants as early as 2003. This work laid the groundwork for today’s AI opportunities.
The future of AI is now. As AI search engines have dramatically improved the ability to glean a user’s question from a few random words, the newest technologies will be able to tell us what questions we should be asking! The radical transformation of business and the society it serves will be the norm in the coming years.
The importance of AI to industry
Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS, describes some of the reasons AI is important for industry today:
- “AI automates repetitive learning and discovery through data.” More than straightforward automation of manual tasks, AI steps further with the automation of sophisticated computer tasks.
- “AI adds intelligence to existing products.” Think the addition of Siri to a family of Apple products.
- “AI adapts through progressive learning algorithms to let the data do the programming.” A critical differentiator from that past, AI software algorithms can now learn from their own use and continually improve.
- “AI analyzes more and deeper data using neural networks that have many hidden layers.” AI has dramatically changed the depth of data analysis. A tremendous amount of data is necessary to train these deep progressive learning models and the greater the amount of data that can be analyzed, exponentially greater accuracy is achieved.
- “AI achieves incredible accuracy though deep neural networks – which was previously impossible.” We witness this daily with Alexa, Google Photos and Google Search. These tools are all built upon deep learning. This is the reason these devices become smarter and smarter the more frequently people use them.
Examples of how industry is changing with AI
AI in e-commerce
Though we may not have noticed, the online buying experience is much easier today than it was a couple of years ago and this benefits consumers and companies alike:
- Pop up chat boxes help consumers learn about a product and add a personal touch to the process.
- Predictive ordering permits companies to analyze customer behavior and anticipate product needs.
- Recommendation engines accurately suggest items a customer may want and helps boost sales.
- Warehouse automation allows companies to fill and deliver orders in hours rather than days or weeks and restock as needed.
AI in medicine
AI has revolutionized the way the medical industry delivers service. Perhaps the most AI-impacted aspect of medicine has been patient diagnosis. With the enhanced deep learning that comes from AI’s ability to analyze greater volumes of data, a patient’s history can be cross referenced with thousands of similar histories.
Machines can see patterns in digitized data that a few years ago could only be spotted by doctors. The same deep learning has led to a growing ability to personalize treatment, combining drugs, radiation and chemotherapy in cancer treatment, for example, in ways that match individual patient circumstances.
AI deep-learning functions and object recognition and classification are now available to spot cancer from MRIs as accurately as radiologists.
AI in the construction industry
AI now allows companies to predict when to expect a piece of equipment to fail and replace it before it happens. This saves a tremendous amount of time and expense by scheduling the replacement at a time that won’t disrupt construction.
This is better than responding to an emergency and creating a work stoppage when equipment goes down unexpectedly. Taking this process a step further, AI can now understand how to best operate a piece of equipment to maximize its useful life.
AI in the arts
Don’t think that AI is reserved only for heavy industry or scientific endeavors. Recently, AI has been used to detect whether or not a painting is a forgery. It is radically altering the playing field and the rules of how companies and institutions operate.
AI has already established the ability to transform every part of an organization and indeed, our world. And yet, AI has only just begun to work its magic. Fasten your seatbelts!
