AI in Business: The Sky’s the Limit

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around for the past 50 years, but it has seen tremendous development in the past twenty years, partly due to new dedicated hardware that makes certain lengthy operations feasible. AI has departed from specialised, technical academia to become a prominent, commercialised product.

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These days, AI is at the forefront of various new technologies in the market. For instance, your smartphone, which for many is the first and last thing you see every day, uses AI for its facial and voice recognition. But AI isn’t just shaping our lifestyle; it is revolutionising the way we work.

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According to a survey done by Gartner in 2019, AI implementation in enterprises has grown by 270% in the past four years. It is either exciting or worrying, depending on who you ask. Either way, AI has already made its way into industries such as health care, financial services, and retail. Naturally, this development has not gone unnoticed.

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There are many people who have negative preconceived notions about AI. They either worry that AI will take over their jobs, or they think that AI is useless, like in the case of chatbots that don’t provide useful answers, there is no middle ground. I believe that these fears are often unfounded, and opinions are misguided. AI won’t be entirely replacing us nor is it pointless, instead they’re likely to augment our work. According to research done by Accenture, AI technologies are projected to increase labour productivity by up to 40% and enable people to make better use of their time.

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One of the reasons is that AI accelerates the process of repetitive tasks. It is often done through Machine Learning, which is a branch of AI that helps the system to learn from data by identifying patterns. Other AI technologies besides Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, are also needed. Combined, they give AI the ability to make decisions in situations where humans were the only players before. AI technologies can now somewhat mimic human abilities as they can achieve similar or better outcomes in many tasks. So, today, instead of doing mundane, repetitive tasks, you would have the support of AI to automate such tasks so you can have a better oversight of the project without worrying about repetitive, time-consuming tasks.

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AI provides endless possibilities and opportunities that you should capitalise on. Upon implementation, its impact is immediately palpable. AI can help you to extract information from data with speed and accuracy, saving your time and resources. By embracing AI, you’ll be able to reap the benefits of AI and use it to your advantage. For example, if you’re doing research, you could apply AI to automate information extraction, fill in your database, gather better insights from the data, and it's all done much faster.