Artificial Intelligence in 21st Century!

Introduction

Artificial Intelligence is the field of science and technology that combines computer science and repeated learning to enable a computer program to solve a diverse range of problems. Majorly, AI works in the form of set of instructions or algorithm, several of these algorithms work in harmony to create a system. The aim of the system is to resolve a problem or to make the most probable prediction about a certain aspect of input data. The input data is nothing but the problem a user wants to resolve, in the form of a dataset. I believe that AI is the backbone of modern computing or will become one in the next 10 years. The impact of AI and its application might vary from business to business, but it can be said that the overall impression over a period of time is drastic or will be significant in the coming time. In this Paper, we will discuss about the use, impact and Management AI in business, application of AI in business in 21st century- 7 applications that will try to cover the applicational scope of the technology in various business sectors, the future of Business, and Transformation of Business by AI.

What is AI

There are several definitions of AI that have surfaced through the technological age, the one perfectly fits the landscape of this technological marvel is quoted as the science and engineering of making intelligent machines, especially intelligent computer programs that are capable of taking decisions by themselves (McCarthy, 2004). According to me, AI can be defined as the ability of a computer program to complete a task on its own with human level precision, and without any human intervention, while adapting to changes in the problem statement. In a broader perspective, I believe that to be able to define what intelligence is, is itself a tedious task. This is because the level of intelligence is variable in nature, a child being able to identify different colours is a sign of intelligence whereas a dog being able to sit when asked to sit is also a sign of intelligence. Humans were able to fabricate intelligent programs and robots a while ago that displayed this level of task completion ability, but according to me, the scope of AI is not limited to human level intelligence, but it is far broader and deeper. In the contrast to current technological advancements, I believe that we are already in the first quarter of the AI age where we are able to acquire partial human intelligence in our machines. The next quarter would be surpassing human level intelligence and going beyond the limits of our understanding of AI.

The history of AI is ancient, and first mention of an intelligent machine can be found in Greek mythology where Hephaestus, the blacksmith of Greek Gods created mechanical servants and a bronze man, Talos that had human like intellect (Cohen, 1967). Since then, the mentions of AI have been witnessed repeatedly from DaVinci’s Walking Lion in 1515 (Hernandez, 2019), the story of Frankenstein’s monster (Shelley, 1818), to introduction of Turing Test as a way to test intelligent behaviour of Machinery by Alan Turing in his publication “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (Turing, 1936). The advancements in AI began with the development of Computer neural networks, which are a replica of our nerves and how information is processed and transported via each node (See Appendix A).

The architecture of AI, Machine learning and Deep Learning follows the given trend: Deep learning is a subset of Machine Learning and Machine Learning is a subset of AI (IBM, 2020).

Application of AI in business in 21st Century

Applications of AI revolve around 4 concepts of 4 different approaches where machines think humanly, think rationally, act humanly and act rationally (Norvig, 1995). The prior approaches majorly focus on the process and thinking whereas the latter one focus on replicating human behaviour. In this section we will discuss about applications of AI in business in the 21st Century:

Financial Services

AI has played a very important role in the financial services and how business is conducted in this decade. It is predicted that by 2023, digital banking penetration will climb to reach approximately 80% and the aggregate cost savings for banks from AI and its applications is estimated to be at approximately $450 Billion (Phaneuf, 2020). It can be confidently said that the impact, use and management of AI in financial services is very high as the advancements in fintech industry are being utilized by approximately 80% of the banks- from using AI models to streamline the customer user experience, chatbot assistance, personal wealth management platforms, lowering human errors, to saving money (Phaneuf, 2020).

Artificial Intelligence for Customer Experience

As it is said that the customer is always first in every domain of business, it is comparatively easier to provide a better customer experience with the technological advancements. It has now become a necessity for businesses to leverage AI to provide the best services and support possible to their customer base. AI chatbots have proven to be an asset for company’s online platforms as they provide a solution to over 50% of recurring questions that overall improve the user experience while slashing costs required to run the existing system (Nead, 2021). Other applications include learning the customer behaviour patterns to predict user purchasing patterns and provide customized experiences, speed up response times, enhancing human interactions, and managing a high volume of queries efficiently (Nead, 2021).

Artificial Intelligence for Marketing

According to me, AI Marketing is a method of leveraging the data of customer to predict the customer’s next move via the application of machine learning. Over the span of years, AI has helped building a new foundation in the Marketing domain by introducing new strategies while improve the old ones. AI marketing has grown from 29% in 2018 to over 85% in 2020 which is more than 186% growth within the span of 2 years — this shows that by the end of 2021, companies around the world will be spending more than $340 Billion on AI hardware, software, and services (IDC, 2021). The examples of AI modernising the business include JPMorgan Chase Bank’s deal with Persado, an AI solution firm to introduce machine learning in their copywriting to help them achieve more humanity in their marketing (Persado, 2016), and Starbucks using Predictive Analytics to serve Personalized Recommendations to increase their organic revenue by 21% in a year (Richman, 2016).

Smart Assistance

Voice assistant technology began to rise in 2012 with the introduction of Siri by Apple and even at that time, people knew the potential of smart assistants. Almost a decade has passed, and it is now estimated that roughly 1 in 4 US Adults own a smart speaker with almost 160 million devices deployed in American Homes (Sterling, 2020). There are many big companies that provide smart assistant services such as Google, Amazon, Apple and many more. These assistants utilize the capabilities of AI, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and voice intelligence to provide the ever-evolving assistance to users.

Transportation

The application of AI in self driving cars and other transportation has been the revolution in Auto Industry. In the last decade, with the introduction of self-driving cars car manufacturers across the globe have started to utilize the potential of AI in car making. There are many examples like Motional, an Automotive company based in Santa Monica, California has been able to push the potential of self-driving technology into reality- the project is a collaboration between Apertive and Hyundai (Abuelsamid, 2021). Apart from self-driving cars, there has been an increase in self-driving delivery robots in the last 5 years- Refraction AI, a Michigan based Automotive company that manufactures robots that deliver food, groceries, and other utilities in a cheap and more efficient way (Bellan, 2021). These are some examples, and are not limited to these domains, but the impact of AI has been the most in Transportation and Automotive business and Industries.

Supply Chain

AI and Machine Learning are helping the Supply Chain Industry to enhance the current process by optimizing the capabilities required for predicting the productivity, quality, planning capacity, costs and outputs while maintaining the safety. This is evident by the impact of covid and how this phase has resulted in misfunctioning of thousands of supply chains around the globe (Dun & Bradsteet, 2021). The future of supply chain will be digital, and AI will enable end to end transparency by realigning the following processes by improving- procurement by providing full data integration with suppliers, sales by increasing transparency on integrated margin sale, planning by risk adjusted end to end margin optimization, dynamic optimization of routing and reducing costs (McKinsey & Company, 2021).

Healthcare

Advancements in AI are deeply affecting how healthcare is being offered around the world. From identifying symptoms and cure checker to diagnose and treat illness via AI algorithms (Buoy Health, 2021), to detecting cancer via application of AI in screenings, diagnostics tests, and blood samples (Freenome, 2021). AI in medical domain will definitely grow exponentially as it will simplify the lives of patients as well as doctors in the coming time, enabling us to save time, resources and will eliminate human errors persisting in the process.

Future of Business with advancements in AI Technology

As observed in the above section, the applications of AI are already being adopted by majority of the companies and it is estimated that as of 2018, 57% of the companies have integrated at least one AI capability or AI application into their business process to make it easy- which is approximately 25% greater than 2017 (McKinsey & Co, 2018). According to me, the future of the AI will surely change how the business is being conducted around the world. The whole idea of implementing AI in business is to be able to do the existing work with more accuracy, with least number of errors and faster than the human pace. I believe that AI can help us transform the whole landscape of how businesses are being conducted now and how they will be conducted 10 or 20 years down the line — imagine when internet was new, all the people and businesses were sceptical about the enormous change but currently, if a particular business is not online, the business will not remain functional in the coming years. Similarly, AI enables an approach that can help companies utilize the data they’ve generated over years to transform the driving factors of the business and use this opportunity to grow while ensuring results required to run the organization.

The question that occurs to our mind is what is the future of business with advancements in AI Technology?

To answer this question, we need to consider a situation in which the traditional aspect of a business was completely transformed by the application of AI- Amazon for an instance has been in E-Commerce retail since 1996, from Jeff Bezos himself managing, assembling, and packing orders in the initial days to thousands of employees doing the task simultaneously under one roof, Amazon was in desperate need to optimize its warehouse operations. Then came the AI powered tech revolution that transformed the most important aspect of the business- Warehouse management and Delivery. With the rapid development of Amazon’s AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning technology, the whole fulfilment centre was revolutionized with introduction of smart robots with computer vision system to track where each item is present in the warehouse. Application of AI is not only limited to robots and inventory management, but the company uses AI to predict how many units of a particular item will be bought by users in a particular season. As stated by Amazon, the integration of robots at the centres have increased the inventory storage capacity by more than 40% which in turn enables Amazon to deliver products within one or two days (Amazon, 2020).

Amazon is one of the examples of the future of AI in business — As more development is taking place and AI applications are being adopted by more and more users and companies, the future and management of AI is inevitable in the business. AI will not only make human lives easier and will more over replace humans in the domain where the work is hazardous for humans. Even though the adoption of AI is inevitable, yet the actual future of AI in business is as unpredictable as the internet was for business in early 1990s. The world is progressing towards the mixed reality place call Metaverse — which combines the real aspects of world with digital world (Newton, 2019). The recent shift in Facebook to change the company name to Meta, list Facebook as just one of the products of the business, and introduction of Oculus — a Virtual Reality Headset that transforms how we view and consume entertainment will surely have a deeper effect than anticipated on the future of businesses. Metaverse is a more like an immersive 3D layer of internet — and all of it has one thing in common, that is AI as its backbone.

Business world: Adapting to a world transformed by AI

To transform your business with the potential of AI, it is important to understand what AI really is. Although in the 21st Century, it is necessary to utilize the latest technology to maintain the competitive advantage, the implementation of AI is rather a process that requires upmost details and resources. In this section, we will discuss about ways in which a business can adapt to the world transformed by AI:

Understanding the firms’ requirements

The first step to adapt to the world transformed by AI is to understand what the requirements of the firm are. The process of AI implementation contains a lot of steps therefore a strategy or roadmap is required that includes ample of experimentation as AI is nothing but repetitive learning. There are a few questions that need to be answered as a part of this roadmap

Is the AI implementation really important for the firm? — Trying to identify the infrastructure of the process we want to enhance via AI, data to gain insights and strategic direction will help us to gain the insights. Second question is to ask yourself whether we can afford the AI solution or not. This includes not only the technologies required to transform the business, but human resources required to run and drive the solutions as well.

Understanding Challenges associated with AI implementation

There are multiple challenges associated with the AI implementations — can the solution be compliant with all the Canadian regulations like PIPEDA? While collecting data and analyzing it with AI, it is important to focus on regulations as well. Will the process improve the business in the long term? The ability to answer this question can save the company from a huge loss as several people and firms are getting into AI without just because it is a buzz word now a days. Next question is to find the right people to do the job as getting the work done is one aspect of business but getting the work done correctly is what matters. It is very crucial to understand that implementation and talent is equally necessary and should be viewed as an investment — there are multiple ways like outsourcing and hiring professionals to get the implementation done. The last aspect is to understand that adoption to AI is a process, not a task.

Conclusion

To conclude, the business will thrive with application of AI as technology and business are drivers for one another — as technology progresses, business grows and vice versa. The applications of AI are vast in business and these applications will grow over the period of next 10 years. The future of AI is promising in business as more and more businesses irrespective of their size are investing in this technology. I believe that AI is not only becoming the trend that is being followed by large corporations and E-commerce giants, but a technological advancement that is being equally deployed by small companies and start-ups as well. This is due to the fact that cloud computing has become relevantly easier and has enabled us to train models and algorithms while gathering huge amounts of data to make the predictions more accurate. Lastly, the introduction of metaverse will surely play a huge role in transformation of internet from a 2-dimensional space to a 3-dimensional virtual world and AI will be the backbone for this process in the next 10–15 years.

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Appendix

Appendix A

Deep Neural networks are a set of nodes which are interconnected and constitute of input layer, multiple hidden layers, and output layers (IBM, 2020).