Artificial intelligence no longer belongs to the future but to the now. It is making its way from lab to office to home. This means businesses are more or less feeling its impact. And we are not just referring to technological companies.
Now, look at this: the use of AI in an organization requires cross-functional teams. First, it’s not just tech companies. Second, it’s not just IT teams or the AI experts that are involved.
If you have these two ideas as foundation, you can see how AI has become a part of the daily grind. And by understanding the trends, you can take your organization through its AI journey. Here are several ways it’s going to or already making an impact on your business.
Bringing teams together
There will be a collaboration among people from different disciplines. The functions of AI, as applied in industries, render themselves ineffective in companies with employees who work in silos.
Scott Likens at PwC gave a good example:
“An AI solution to help hospital staff decide which medical procedures to authorize, for example, will need input not just from AI and medical specialists, but also from legal, human resources, cybersecurity, and compliance teams.”
Causing leadership to rethink core structures
There is a buzz about majority of investors seeking to fund only businesses that have AI built into their structures and strategies. By 2020, we can expect that AI-powered systems will have become the norm for more than half of the world’s companies.
If it’s the clamor from the investors that will cause this, it is yet to be seen. After all, there will be no such response if people with deep pockets are not seeing the benefits of AI technologies. Machine learning, for instance, has replaced the drudgery of indexing and other time-consuming tasks. This has led to time being spent on tasks that add more business value. And for investors and businesses, time is money.
Making adoption necessary and possible
Companies that can understand and predict consumer behavior will have a competitive edge. To accomplish this, they need to gather and analyze data fast. Once expensive, predictive analytics tools have become more accessible to many. And they provide bite-sized insights through which businesses can find out their customer identity and needs.
This observation by Scoro is on point:
“AI-based tools that think about the ecosystem they are utilized in will see the most adoption, especially if they can quickly collect and analyze data from platforms companies use today, like Salesforce or Amazon Web Services.”
Driving conversations within companies
From the executive to the rank-and-file, conversations are being penetrated with AI facts. To be prepared for digital disruption, organizations are demystifying AI by first understanding basic terminologies.
Perhaps because of pop culture, we have long associated it with robots, mostly runaway and trying to destroy humanity. But there are more moving parts than ever, and it is enlightening to know that there are such differences as a “weak AI” and a “strong AI”.
Other types include reactive machines AI, the best example of which is IBM’s chess-playing computer called Deep Blue; limited memory AI, which is used in self-driving cars; and theory of mind AI, which has not been realized in society but will be the building block for developing robots that can read eye and face movements.
Creating new jobs
The impact of AI on jobs has caused quite a stir and, in some cases, debates. One prominent argument asks: are we going to let machines take over our jobs? But detracting from this point a bit, some reports have shown that AI is simplifying tasks. In doing so, it is not eliminating jobs but job tasks. The result here is that employees can shift their attention toward human-oriented tasks.
If that’s the case, the best we can do is to transfer our employees to new roles. We’ve seen this at work in digital marketing. Experts in this area have begun employing virtual assistants to create unique digital journeys for their customers. Such effort would be impossible to sustain especially for small businesses had they chosen to assign a human agent per n customers.
Final thoughts
Many industries are seeing that AI is the way to go forward. And 2018 has been predicted as the year AI will go mainstream. Given its impact, it is now impossible to ignore it.
So, are you diving in or not?
