Artificial Intelligence (AI) — How can your Business benefit from AI?
By now, everybody has heard of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
2016 was the year of hyped conversation around AI, machine learning, and one of the most basic applications to emerge from these technologies: chatbots.
Let’s talk about some global AI trends, use cases for various industries and its benefits for your business. As interest is growing every day, I’m getting the same questions again and again at deepPiXEL.
- What is AI?
- Why should I care about AI?
- How is AI going to help me?
- How can I start using AI today?
Briefly, deepPiXEL provides AI solutions focused on text-based conversations for businesses in finance, retail and telecom industries. Over the past few months, we have talked to over 200 companies in these and other industries. Today, I’d like to pass on some of the knowledge and insights we have gleaned from these conversations.
It’s estimated by CFO.com that 40% of online transactions will be handled via an AI-enabled bot by 2020. The speed of adoption is fascinating even if we only hit 25% by that time. Last year at the annual IBM investor’s day, CEO Ginni Rometty explained the company’s position.
Machine Learning (IBM calls cognitive computing) is at the heart of the $2 trillion market IBM sees developing by 2025. ~ Ginni Rometty
Data of all sorts will be used to understand, reason, talk, make decisions and learn. It is estimated by IBM that Decision Support will create $2 trillion worth of IT spending by 2025 (beyond the $1 trillion companies already spend on software, services, and hardware).
But What Do They Mean By AI?
Artificial intelligence is the future. Artificial intelligence is science fiction. Artificial intelligence is already a part of our everyday lives. All those statements are true; it just depends on what flavor of AI you are referring to.
To help us understand how is AI is being talked about today, the chart below comes in handy.
To be clear, AI is the big umbrella that encompasses terms like machine learning and deep learning. Deep learning is the latest breakthrough in AI, which we see with AlphaGo.
Today’s AI is a combination of machine learning and deep learning techniques, which are being used for various applications in the market. Most of today’s use cases are based on supervised learning techniques where we have an end goal in mind (meaning the output data sets are provided and used to train the machine to produce and get the desired output). In “unsupervised” learning, no data sets are provided, instead the data is clustered into different classes. As one user explains it on Quora, suppose you provide the solution to your kids for each and every situation in their lives — this would qualify as supervised. On the other hand, if your kids make their decisions from their own understanding, your kids are unsupervised.
This is where a lot of the excitement over the future of AI stems from. Essentially, the AI goes into the problem blind and unsupervised. This is true AI. Unfortunately, many people don’t understand the difference, and they expect the current AI technology to handle things we are used to seeing in sci-fi movies.
It’s for this reason that I think it’s important to clarify what AI is and how much should we expect from it. Now that we know the difference between supervised and unsupervised AI, the next question is: Why should we all care?
The Latest AI Trends
If you are asking why AI is important for you and your business, let’s consider few facts.
Here is what’s happening in the world:
- Facebook just recently revealed their plan for going all in into AI, AR, and VR at the annual F8 conference.
- “The Era of Mobile Internet is Over” as Baidu is heavily investing in AI.
- Retail is being eaten by giants who are heavily investing in AI (See examples here and here).
- Telecom is starting to benefit from AI to cut costs and improve customer experience (such as Vodafone).
- JP Morgan is using AI to automate high finance and improve employee productivity.
- Deloitte calls AI (or MI as they refer to it in their article) to receive 64% of total investments according to the Global CIO Survey.
Deloitte’s 2016 Global CIO Survey had asked 1,200 IT executives to name new technologies in which they planned to invest significantly over the next two years: 64 percent of those included cognitive technologies, or MI.
All of the tech giants are investing heavily in AI, as you can see below.
The recent hype has created a lot of excitement around Artificial Intelligence. Gartner published a report on the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends in 2017. Unsuprisingly, AI is at the top of the list. If you are not acting on AI today, you will be playing catch-up. I’d compare it to during the late 90s and early 2000s when e-commerce hit the market like nothing else, yet giants like Walmart, Sears, Macy’s and others didn’t pay attention. Now, they have to make up a ton of lost ground. The Wall street Journal recently published an article on the demise of brick and mortar’s recent fate and stream of store closures. Playing catch-up rarely produces pleasant results. This is a rare opportunity for organizations large and small to make AI a priority before getting too far behind. We have seen companies like Google, Baidu, IBM, Facebook, Uber and Amazon compete to be on the forefront of the AI revolution. But if you are not a tech company or your focus is not on technology, it is almost impossible to compete with these giants. The question becomes: how do I use AI to my benefit and stay competitive?
How Are Companies Around The World Using Artificial Intelligence Today?
People are talking about all sorts of applications for AI. My goal is to set realistic expectations and provide examples of how you can position your business around AI to avoid missing out.
In the past year, we at deepPiXEL have talked to over 200 potential clients to help them determine what AI can do for them today. In our discussions we have come up with many use cases that companies can benefit from. We have mainly focused on the financial, retail and telecom industries, as they are the ones that appear hungry to innovate. But AI is industry agnostic. If you are looking for how you can benefit from the hype of AI, read on.
Harvard Business Review (HBR) recently published an article outlining the areas where AI is being used the most by business today.
Deloitte’s report, Tech Trends 2017: The Kinetic Enterprise, describes AI as a subset of a larger, more important category of technologies (MI) that also includes machine learning, deep learning, cognitive analytics, robotics process automation (RPA), and bots, to name a few. “Collectively, these and other tools constitute machine intelligence: algorithmic capabilities that can augment employee performance, automate increasingly complex workloads, and develop ‘cognitive agents’ that simulate both human thinking and engagement,” the report states.
With the help of AI, companies can improve the customer experience, augment employee performance, automate work processes, and develop intelligent agents to help with a lot of repetitive business processes (as JP Morgan has started doing).
In the rest of my article, I will provide examples how AI can help your business today. I have categorized them into 3 parts.
1. Brands & Retail Use Cases
2. Banking Use Cases
3. Organizational — Employee Use Cases
Recent research shows that 55% of UK consumers say the most important factor in the ideal customer experience is getting a prompt and effective response to queries. This highlights the need for companies to provide faster and more integrated customer service responses. With 75% of all consumers aged 18–25 using instant messaging everyday, intelligent digital agents are the answer for providing customers with the quick and easy web chat service they want.
It’s important to note that compelling evidence is already showing that investing back into office AI solutions provides the greatest return among consumer facing solutions. According to the HBR article I referenced above, some 51% of AI leaders predicted that by 2020 AI will have its biggest impact on their back office functions of IT, HR, and finance/accounting (see the JP Morgan example). This is because AI technology will free up employees’ time to focus on deep work rather than spending time on easily automatable tasks like password resets and company policy related questions.
This is how businesses are benefiting from AI today, and this is where you should start as well. There is a ton of momentum and the benefits are massive.
The applications themselves are fairly simple to use. We have learned during our conversations that some of these simple functions take up 80% of total transactions being handled by human workers. This adds to massive support costs for providing no real value to either customers or the company itself. Time and time again, we have seen that automating fairly simple transactions and workflows allows employees and customers to spend more time elsewhere resulting in more value at the end.
In my next article, I will write in more detail how we at deepPiXEL are helping organizations around the world leverage AI. But for now, see what you come up with and how the above use cases could help your company. I’m sure there are a lot of potential opportunities out there waiting to be executed with AI.
It would be great to hear from you folks on how you are using AI today. What are your experiences? What’s next for you? Drop me a note in the comments below or at tjabbarli@deeppixel.ai.
Thanks to Harris Maxwell, Mykyta Ponomarenko, Mahammad Ismayilzade and Nargiz Mammadova for reading drafts of this piece.
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