The fascinating world of AI and Machine Learning is steadily penetrating across all sectors of the economy. AI today is no longer a remote possibility or a science fiction but a real phenomenon.
Globally millions are being spent by various sectors in innovations and applications.
According to Gartner, $2.9 trillion would be spent on new business and value opportunities in AI by 2021. It has also estimated 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity attributable to AI.
AI technologies are forever changing how we look at things. Elon Musk said, “Most people don’t understand just how quickly machine intelligence is advancing, it’s much faster than almost anyone realized, even within Silicon Valley.”
While some experts like Musk have made speculations around the potential harmful impact of AI in future, for the most part these disruptive technologies with super-human abilities are creating far-reaching impact in augmenting existing functions in businesses, offloading the burden of work from humans and providing ease and sophistication in everyday life.
There are many uses of AI and Machine Learning that we may not be aware of. Let us see some of those:
Ride sharing apps like Uber and Lyft
GPS navigation services are in use everywhere. Using Machine Learning, systems can predict the possibility of congestion, traffic situations, and estimated arrival time. It further helps in share-riding by predicting the price based on distance travelled. Using various data, it can take into account a possible detour and decide on the shortest possible route. With frequent use of these ride-sharing apps, machine learning is also able to predict your drop-zone by prompting your frequently visited locations for quick booking.
E-mail spam filters
Gmail is said to filter 99.9% of spam, by using machine learning algorithms. This is improving overall functionality of their email services. As per research, there is a huge variation between user preferences for volume of important mail. Gmail’s Priority Inbox (PDF) functioning chooses to filter out the most important emails similarly using machine learning.
Virtual digital assistants
Digital assistants like Alexa, Siri and Cortana are slowly becoming a household name. These are on various platforms including Android, iOS windows mobile phones. These are useful in finding information about everything that is on the web, from weather, to news to shopping, to information about places – the digital assistants are here to help. Additionally, they help in maintaining personal schedules, setting reminders and a host of other functions.
Online shopping
Ever browsed through a site and skipped buying a product only to see the product show up repeatedly in multiple sites while browsing the web. It is all machine learning in play. There are also things like product recommendation and complimentary purchase suggestions and personalized shopping enabled though machine learning.
Amazon’s transactional A.I. has made way for huge monetary gains online. Its machine learning algorithms has studied user behavior online and has got more smart and accurate overtime in predictive selling.
Search engine results
With AI and Machine learning, search results have got more accurate, specific and streamlined. This is way more sophisticated than the traditional keyword search. Search engines use machine Learning and natural language processing to understand a user query better by intuition gained through study of past search patterns.
Customer support
AI enables personalized customer support through its chatbots. Chatbots use chat interfaces to assist customers in purchase, query, billings and serves to function as a 24/7 representative of a business.
