Do you think Siri’s ability to tell you the name of song you just heard in the coffee shop is cool? Did you appreciate the heads up when your bank spotted an irregular charge on your credit card?
Just wait.
These are some of the ways that Artificial Intelligence (AI) touches your life today, and, as Cameron Chell points out, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Artificial intelligence promises to be one of the more significant tech trends in 2018, continuing an expansion of applications that’s been gathering steam.
“We use artificial intelligence in all sorts of ways today to make our lives easier,” says Chell, the entrepreneur and co-founder of Business Instincts Group, who works with his co-founders, executives and investors to build high-tech startups.
“People just don’t realize how pervasive its use is. Siri is a fun gadget. Using artificial intelligence to monitor and flag possibly fraudulent transactions is useful. The more we understand its potential, the more we can create new uses around it,” Chell says.
Artificial intelligence is the development of computer systems that can perform tasks that normally need human “intelligence” to carry out. IBM’s Watson is a well known example of AI in action: It was created specifically to answer questions on the television quiz show Jeopardy, and in 2011 it won first place and $1 million in the process. Today, it’s the name of IBM’s AI platform for businesses.
Cameron Chell points out that development of AI applications is moving at an extremely rapid pace. Today, the global market for AI stands at $2.4 billion. This is expected to reach $4 billion by 2018, and skyrocket to $59.7 billion by 2025.
As a tech trendsetter in 2018, AI’s use is expected to expand for purposes like better customer engagement. Currently, for example, AI is the driving force behind the “chat-bots” that are all the rage among businesses and techies. These are AI systems that interact with humans via text – on matters as simple as delivering a weather report to as complicated as troubleshooting issues with your Internet service.
Chat bots have become so effective, in fact, that you may have already communicated with AI instead of a human during a service interaction online, and not even known it. Work is currently underway to allow artificial intelligence to detect human emotion. When that breakthrough happens, the implications will be astonishing. Consider the psychotherapy “counselor”-bot, for example, that has been tested in work with patients who have PTSD.
Artificial intelligence will likely also play a larger role in the business world in 2018 and beyond. AI now uses analytical tools to identify waste for businesses and will likely continue to be used in business decision making. AI can also take the place of human beings for certain functions, leading to cost and time savings for many tasks that businesses need performed.
Cameron Chell believes the future of AI is bright, with everything from greater speech recognition to better integrated “virtual agents” in the home, doing things like locking your doors for you.
“AI is the future,” Cameron Chell adds. “How we decide to use it is really up to us.”
