Detailed Guide to Artificial Intelligence at Scale and its Use Cases

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)? – Definition

Artificial intelligence (AI), is a branch of technology that deals with machines that possess the ability to think, make decisions and other intellectual characteristics like human beings. In today’s modern world, artificial intelligence takes the main stage when it comes to technology and businesses. The code-driven systems that can accumulate information and provide connectivity have created a new era that was once unimaginable and have brought up various opportunities in almost every field of technology.

Current Adoption Trends of AI

With AI being involved in performing various tasks like business planning, customer service and predictive analysis and maintenance, the adoption rate of AI on enterprise-level keeps exponentially increasing.

Although AI could offer limitless opportunities, there are still factors like lack of sufficient data, strategy and skills to adopt this technology that are being barriers for traditional enterprises to adopt AI on a large scale. Meanwhile, few companies figured out a way to implement this technology and extract its advantages across their infrastructure.

Among the business verticals, the need to improve customer experience and increase employee efficiency are found to be the key reasons to adopt AI. The usage of AI differs vastly with different industrial verticals. Some of the most prominent fields include IT automation, supply chain and logistics, automated customer services and automated human resources.

Future of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the next 5 years (2021-2025).

AI with allied technologies like machine learning (ML) and deep learning have already achieved almost-human-like performance in many areas. Over the next decade, AI and bot-powered automation is expected to surpass human capabilities in decision-making.

As AI is moving towards increasing its ability related to autonomous operation, self-driving vehicles will become more common. Tesla, the trillion-dollar automobile and clean energy company, has come up with the concept of self-driving cars that can take up short and long-distance trips with no human intervention. This model brought up Tesla is still in its research and development stage and it is expected to arrive at the market very shortly.

The powerful trio that comprises natural language processing (NLP), predictive analysis and IoT-powered smart sensors could potentially create noticeable changes in day-to-day activities. Looking at the current scenario, it is clear that AI would be an integral part of the business processes and will create a new dimension of digital transformation which has not been witnessed yet.

Market Size and Growth Rate of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The global artificial intelligence (AI) market is expected to grow up to $252 billion by the year 2023 with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 42.5% between 2019 and 2023.

This conclusive report was made by analyzing the global market size by region, sector, component, technology and organization size.

Some of the top companies in the global artificial intelligence market are Amazon, Google, Microsoft and IBM.

Major players in the field of Artificial Intelligence

1) Amazon

Amazon web services (AWS) the leading cloud service provider also provides AI-based services for individual as well as for enterprise purposes. The majority of AI services are built on consumer products.

For personal use, AWS offers Amazon Echo that is connected to Alexa, an intelligent voice server.

For enterprises, AWS offers three different AI services each for the business version of Alexa, text to speech conversion and for image recognition. These respective services are named Lex, Polly and Rekognition.

2) Google

Google, a leading company in artificial intelligence and data analytics, offers AI services that are specifically built-in on a device called the google assistant. They also provide mobile-based AI services for androids.

In addition to these, Google cloud AI sells its AI and machine learning services to various enterprises. Google has taken up industry-leading projects in TensorFlow and developed their own Tensor AI chip project.

3) Microsoft

Microsoft, a leading producer of computer software, electronics, Pcs and related services, offers both consumer and business-related AI services.

The customer-related AI service, known as Cortana comes in-build within the windows. Of late, the mobile version of Cortana has also been released.

Microsoft’s enterprise-grade AI services include chatbots, machine learning and other cognitive services.

4) IBM

IBM is the oldest leading company in the field of AI. IBM has been offering AI services since the 1950s. The recent AI-based services that are offered by IBM are IBM Watson and AI-based cognitive services.

IBM specializes in offering AI software as a service and systems that are designed for cloud-based analytics and AI services.

Uses of Artificial Intelligence In Different Industrial Sectors

The usage of AI is widespread among various industrial verticals, out of which a few of them are mentioned below:

IT automation

Artificial intelligence has completely changed the traditional ways and methods of computing and also the way industries worked. The IT sector being all about computers and related things, AI played a major role in this field by paving ways to build secure systems, improve productivity, automate business processes and optimize servers.

Supply chain management and logistics

With the advancement of technology, the rate of error in the supply chain is exponentially decreasing. By adopting AI in supply chain management and logistics, the efficiency and the speed of business processes between the suppliers and business vendors can be greatly improved while reducing uncertainties of any kind. AI in supply chain management and logistics is beneficial in many ways like increasing warehouse efficiency and security, effective inventory management, reduce operational cost and ensure on-time delivery.

Customer services

Customer relationship management (CRM) plays an important role in the success of any business. By leveraging AI many companies are moving towards automating and improving their CRM using AI-powered chatbots that provide 24/7 customer support. This increased the chances for businesses to interact with customers and understand their needs. Implementing AI in CRM can also be helpful in gaining real-time insights on customer contact channels, optimize agent availability and waiting time,  deliver tailored services and enable field agents to deliver necessary support based on the collected CRM data.

Healthcare and medicine

Out of all the aforementioned fields, the healthcare sector has been massively influenced by the advent of artificial intelligence. From chronic diseases to cancer, there are unlimited opportunities to leverage AI to provide precise, efficient and impactful treatments to patients. AI also offers numerous advantages over the traditional ways of analytics and clinical decision-making. AI can also be used in making wearable healthcare devices like smartwatches, improve the ways of treating cancer, revolutionize clinical decision making, etc…

Limitations of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

There are numerous benefits that come with implementing artificial intelligence. But at the same time, there are some limitations to adopting this technology.

Cost of implementation

AI, one of the most complex technologies, requires a huge amount even during the initial stages of implementation like setting up AI-based machines and computers. It also needs a huge amount to repair and maintain these devices.

Inability to replace man-power

Machines can work a lot more efficiently and accurately when compared to humans. But humans are capable of adaptation and rapid evolution whereas AI-based machines rely upon a bunch of codes. Moreover, machines cannot adapt themselves to the changing environment and they are confined to the restrictions of the environment that they are built-in.

Lack of creativity

AI can predict market trends, provide precisely analyzed results from a set of data, make decisions based on inputs given and so on. But AI is not built for the tasks that require creativity. Although AI-based machines can assist in creating and designing products, the levels of creativity of the AI machine are bound to the levels of creativity of the person who programs the AI.

Risk of unemployment

Artificial intelligence has made its impact in almost every field of technology and industry. With a majority of the repetitive tasks being automated, it really raises a question as to whether or not AI would cause the risk of unemployment. From a practical standpoint, AI might replace some areas like accounting and market analytics, where humans had to do hours of monotonous repetitive work. But as mentioned earlier, AI cannot entirely replace man-force. In some areas, more than replacing, AI would more likely be assisting humans shortly.

According to McKinsey’s report, by 2030 almost 30% of the current human labor will be replaced by AI-assisted agents and robots.

Career Scope of Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The field of artificial intelligence has so much to offer in terms of career opportunities too. AI offers career opportunities like machine learning engineer, data scientist, developer, research scientist and AI engineer.

Since almost every field has started adopting and implementing AI, very prominent job roles are available in this field lately.

To learn about how AI works or get started with the AI-related career path many online courses have been offered by experts in this field.

Some of the best AI courses offered are mentioned below:

1. AI for everyone (Coursera)
2. Artificial intelligence A-Z: How to build an AI (Udemy)
3. Beginner’s guide to AI (Udemy)
4. Introduction to AI (Coursera)
5. Advanced AI: Deep reinforcement learning in python (Lazy Programmer, Udemy)
6. Machine learning free crash course (Google)

Experts Insights on Artificial Intelligence

Below are the thoughts and insights of some of the few leading and aspiring leaders and experts in the field of AI.

• Tesla and SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk, predicts that the world is moving towards a time where AI will be capable of surpassing human intelligence. He also predicts that this would happen by 2025.
• According to Brian Cornell, CEO of Target corporation, technology is will have adverse effects on the way companies work and with AI in the field of technology, companies will be able to figure out the true potential of AI.
• According to Helen Poitevin, senior research director at Gartner, a lot of companies keep adopting AI-based technologies such as visual assistants or NLP and AI-powered chatbots to improve productivity and support employees. However, companies have to additionally focus on maintaining and preventing these AI-based agents to prevent digital harassment and ensure smooth user experiences.

The advancement of technology is purely an iterative process. That being said, we are yet to discover the full potential of artificial intelligence and its application towards process improvement. In the future, there could be devices and new technologies that are beyond imagination for today’s modern world.