We are at the juncture of time where science fictions are coming out of movies and becoming realities. It was fancy enough to have imagined a world ruled by machines in the movie 'Terminators', but now, the scientists and the engineers are putting in a lot of hard work to feed the data to the machine and help it in learning the patterns. With these patterns, machines are becoming intelligent every day and are able to respond to the ever-changing scenarios. So, no more boring and mundane jobs for the machines, as now they can take basic level decisions based on their intelligence and, well, the day isn’t far when complex decisions will be entrusted on the acquired wisdom of the nonhuman intelligence.
The term Artificial Intelligence (AI) was coined in 1956, but it took decades of innovation and research across different domains to make artificial intelligence acceptable to the society and to businesses across the spectrum. As we are witness to, we have at home the avatar of AI in the form of Siri or Alexa or Watson or Google assistant; but going forward the AI is poised to change the landscape significantly.
With the current age of data overloads, it is humanly impossible to analyze that volume of data and make any sense out of that. This is where AI comes to help. The subset of AI is machine learning (ML), through which algorithms learn as they encounter large volumes of data or huge variability in data and apply their acquired learnings to make better decisions. The algorithm sifts through the data, analyze and, most importantly suggest corrective and preventive actions. For example, in a manufacturing company, the machines connected to a central server generate a tremendous amount of data every second (8~10GB/sec) which is voluminous, high on variability and high velocity. The AI algorithm analyses this big data and track specific performance parameters such as machine utilization. If the AI bot tracks any issue in a machine, it may trigger a maintenance initiative for that machine.
Offering the right product and service at the right time in the right quantity is the biggest challenge any business faces, in the context of changing consumer behaviour.
Loyalty is becoming costlier to retain and tougher to gain. So, business would want to seize any opportunity that comes their way. This requires accurate forecasting and agility to adjust to the changing market scenarios. All these need constant monitoring of multiple trends, including consumer mood survey, social media buzz, economic trends, photos, videos uploaded by the potential consumers, etc. Wide variety of data, their sources, and analysis make the job humanly impossible. Here comes AI to the rescue, the algorithms not only analyze the data but also adjust outcomes according to the changing trend.
However, this is just the tip of the iceberg as AI and ML have huge potential to change the business scenarios globally. As we speak, the artificial intelligence is seeping into almost every industry such as automobile, healthcare, retail, aviation, banking, financial services and insurance to name a few and is disrupting the current business models and igniting the endless opportunities for innovation. With AI calling the shots, new business models would evolve, and current models perhaps would be remembered through case studies.
