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Virtually no sector has been left untouched by the long arms of Artificial Intelligence. From healthcare to retail and even public governance, AI has fundamentally changed the way organizations operate.
AI has been pivotal in optimizing decision making, streamlining operations, reducing costs and predicting business disruptions. Enterprises with an existing robust digital strategy that leveraged AI have already seen better ROI than their peers even during COVID-19.
Suffice to say that most industries are looking at a radically different landscape 5 years from now courtesy of innovations in AI.
In light of this, we take a look at some real-time impacts on a select few industries and their potential reverberations in the near future.
Personalized E-Learning Powered By AI
The digital transformation acceleration seen in e-learning is expected to sustain and even pick up pace post-COVID. With social distancing becoming the norm, intelligent virtual classroom solutions like Blackboard Collaborate and Adobe Connect are seeing an increase in request for demos.
Even after the pandemic abates, AI will still have a prominent presence in the modern classroom. An AI-powered teaching assistant called Happy Numbers deployed at the Slackwood Elementary School in New Jersey is helping teachers to identify students who are struggling to meet their math benchmarks.
Solutions like Brightspace Insights aggregates a student’s learning pattern from multiple sources to provide a holistic model of their learning behavior. This further helps educationists to curate personalized content as per the student’s abilities.
The deployment of such AI solutions will become common across nations.
Clearly, this transformation of education with AI will go a long way in meeting the talent needs of the future workforce.
Smart Retail & E-Commerce Will Drive Consumption
With new sources of retail-related data emerging through IoT and mobile devices, human analysts will be hard pressed to keep up with the data processing. Retailers are investing in cutting-edge technologies like ML, robotics, data analytics, and logistics automation in a quest to process volumes of data to become more customer-centric and flexible to the ebbs and flows of the market.
As of Q1 2020, AI-enabled chatbots are catering to about 25% of all customer service interactions in this sector.
In retail, personalization is key to boosting sales. In fact, according to a Salesforce study, 51% of customers expect retailers to anticipate their demands and make relevant suggestions. This is where advanced AI steps in.
Retailers like Walmart and Amazon are using ML to mine customer data in real time to provide targeted recommendations to them, ultimately driving increased conversions.
But it’s not just in driving sales, even routine store operations are also getting a fillip.
Shelf monitoring and replenishments are managed using computer vision-enabled cameras. Self-checkout points have emerged as a blessing in disguise during a pandemic. Amazon Go convenience stores with their complete removal of the checkout process has taken this one step further.
While robotic assistants have already been in place in retail warehouses for some time now, they are now being deployed in stores as well to help with routine tasks. They can sell things, monitor inventory levels, help customers to find items, and also simply serve as in-store greeters.
AI Is Saving Lives
From developing the next generation of radiology tools to ensuring democratic access to healthcare, healthcare is one industry that is being revolutionized by AI.
The changes happening here are truly encouraging and makes one optimistic about the future of AI.
For example, healthcare startups like AiCure and Aidoc are leveraging the power of AI to better understand the connection between patients, disease and treatment. AI is also helping doctors identify and classify out-of-place lesions in medical images and predicting whether a patient is susceptible to develop cognitive diseases at a later stage in life.
But most importantly, AI is giving doctors more time to connect with their patients by taking over mundane, but essential tasks like taking notes and reading scans. Our report on Deep Medicine provides some eye-opening insights on the impact of AI in medicine.
Secure Banking
Robotic process automation & Natural Language Processing are being used in banking to reduce the need for manual intervention.
ML algorithms are now deployed to perform comprehensive credit risk assessment and even fraud detection. Certain models are also able to predict risk of exposure to default and loss due to credit default. A prime example of this is ZestFinance, which bills itself as a Big Data underwriter.
Fraud prevention is another area that will see a big overhaul thanks to AI technology. Using ML and pattern recognition, banks are able to flag suspicious transactions before lasting damage can be done. Datavisor’s AI-based fraud detection solution can detect 30% more frauds with 90% accuracy.
Closer home, Gmail’s ML model blocks more than 10 million spam and malicious emails every minute!
Opportunities for AI Sales
Naturally, AI solutions encompass a wide-range of technological requirements. From advanced analytics to predictive maintenance, industries are quickly turning to new-age technology companies to gain a competitive edge over their peers.
AI is poised to become a high-demand digital theme in the post-COVID-19 era. As AI penetration increases, the need for robust data management strategies will increase exponentially. COVID showed the importance of being prepared for the future and the future is AI.
This means that service providers are looking at a high demand for cloud migration, data warehousing, statistical modelling and other allied services.
The Draup for Sales platform features a proprietary dashboard tracking real-time signals for AI implementation opportunities. Armed with the right location and industry intelligence data for the target market, Draup helps service providers confidently make inroads into untapped markets.
