4 Things Your Business Really Needs to Know About Artificial Intelligence

The excitement around artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) has created enormous hype in the digital landscape. It’s easy to understand why - from a commercial and business perspective, the current applications of artificial intelligence are phenomenal.

Computers are getting smarter with every passing day -- some even predict that they'll overtake human intellectual capacity by as early as 2029. But, AI is more than a technology that will define our future -- it is impacting our present in some extraordinary ways too.

From 2013-2017, over $3 billion was invested specifically in AI-related companies. Beyond the Facebooks and Googles of the world, there are a host of start-ups and open-source initiatives applying next-gen machine learning, AI, and Big Data technologies to real-world business use cases.

 As AI heads towards the mainstream, SBM has shared four things you need to know about AI to ensure your business learns as much from machines as they learn from us.

 

  1. Believe the hype

With any new pioneering tech, there is always a disconnect between perception and reality - but in this case, the excitement is warranted. Here are some concrete examples of commercial applications of AI.

JPMorgan Chase recently introduced a system for reviewing commercial loan contracts, which means work that once took loan officers 360,000 hours is now completed in a few seconds.

One Brazilian online retailer implemented an AI system to predict the likelihood of customers clicking on certain advertisements, allowing them to make ad placements more effective, resulting in $125 million in additional revenue.

Of all the commercial applications of AI, Google's recent mapping of the exact location of every business, household and street number in France stands out as especially remarkable. Traditionally a job this vast would have required hundreds of GPS-enabled humans to manually go suburb to suburb and would have likely taken well over a year.

Using AI, Google was able to program its image-recognition software to trawl through the millions of images in its Street View database to identify street numbers. The entire process took less than 60 minutes.

 

2. Harnessing AI will make your business smarter

AI is making our existing technology smarter and unlocking the power of all the data that enterprises collect. What that means: Widespread advancement in machine learning (ML), computer vision, deep learning, and natural language processing (NLP) have made it easier than ever to bake an AI algorithm layer into your software or cloud platform.

For businesses, practical AI applications can manifest in all sorts of ways, depending on your organizational needs and the business intelligence insights derived from the data you collect. Enterprises can employ AI for everything from mining social data to driving engagement in customer relationship management (CRM) to optimizing logistics and efficiency when it comes to tracking and managing assets.

3. Will AI disrupt my industry?

Yes, it could. But not in the way you think. From the enterprise point of view, what's happening right now could disrupt some core corporate business processes around coordination and control: scheduling, resource allocation and reporting. These are very time-consuming tasks. Other opportunities on the enterprise side require more creativity and social intelligence that's not addressed by current technology. But technologists predict we’ll see this in the continued progression of AI over the next three to five years.

 

4. Data is King

What do you do when your business collects staggering volumes of new data? Today's business applications are raking in mountains of new customer, market, social listening, and real-time app, cloud, or product performance data. Predictive analytics is one way to leverage all of that information, gain tangible new insights, and stay ahead of the competition.

Your organization can use predictive analytics in a variety of different ways, from predictive marketing and data mining to applying machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to optimize business processes and uncover new statistical patterns. It's basically computers learning from past behavior about how to do certain business processes better and deliver new insights into how your organization really functions.

Data is King, but it’s still vulnerable to theft and corruption from cyber attack. Now that your business is collecting, sharing and storing data from multiple places, servers and devices, SBM can help you enhance your cyber security strategy to safeguard your digital assets. 

Your businesses can employ AI and predictive analytics to save time, save money, and gain an edge over the rest of the market. SBM can help your company stay ahead of the competition with smart tools that provide real financial and business value and help you glean market insights, streamline your processes and improve your bottom line.

Talk to us today and learn more about AI.

 

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