Top Trending Artificial Intelligence Skills with Surprising Business Benefits

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has proved to be the most powerful of all emerging technologies and most of us are aware of the potential it holds to make the world a better place. However, you may be amazed at the speed at which it’s getting closer to human intelligence and efficacy every single day. The AI models are empowering machines to deliver many of the tasks for which human resources were indispensable earlier. 

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If you are a regular reader of my articles, you may have read the one in which I had discussed about the top skills that will be needed for the future of work in any industry. In another article, I had narrated about AI replicating human voice including the advantages and risks. In this article, we look at those skills which AI has mastered well and yielding fantastic business benefits.

Read to Produce Better Versions

Due to time constraints, many of us skip reading an entire message, be it on mail or social media. We wonder if we could manage reading only the important points or just the summary for further action. Through artificial intelligence along with machine learning, blockchain and natural language processing technologies, it is now possible to read emails, blogs and articles, books, documents, audio and image files, summarize the text and report back the imperatives in multi-language. The algorithms are being used in solving problems related to abstractive summarization, question answering systems and predictive analytics for legal, consulting, financial, publishing, media, automotive, healthcare, pharmaceutical, hospitality, travel and other industries. Since AI and ML models are way faster in processing as compared to human brain, businesses are witnessing multifold benefits in cost, time and effort through the implementation of these systems.

Write to Publish News Articles, Reports and Other Documents

Artificial Intelligence systems are gaining momentum in the publishing industry for generating reports, writing blogs and news articles and even extending to creative writing such as poetry and stories. The Guardian, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post, Reuters, The New York Times and more are relying on artificial intelligence to generate content. Professionals in the field of media and marketing are resorting to AI to design their social media posts. Other popular usages of AI include Business Intelligence dashboards, personalized emails, financial portfolio reports, etc. AI has also been successful in co-authoring a novel titled “The Day A Computer Writes A Novel” that was nominated for the Hoshi Shinichi Literary National award in the field of literature in Japan and qualified in the first level of screening.

The software process that enables AI with writing skills is called Natural Language Generation (NLG). The end-user, the NLG solution or the software provider needs to define the template of the content for the NLG to work. Few of the NLG tools available include Wordsmith from Automated Insights, Quill from Narrative Science, Google’s Text-to-Speech, Amazon’s Polly and in-house tools such as Heliograf at the Washington Post.

Visualize to Analyze, Predict, Make Decisions

Computer vision is a subset of artificial intelligence ecosystem where computers can see the world, analyze visual data, make decisions based on it or gain understanding as well as develop a perception about any object, environment and situation. The key factor driving the growth of computer vision is the tremendous amount of data that is generated daily, which is used to train the algorithms and improve computer vision. On an average, daily 3-4 billion images and videos are shared online. It is not just the massive volume of images and videos captured through cameras, but also data generated from sensors and other sources that serve as inputs for computer vision technology. The computing power essential to analyze such volumes of data is much easily accessible and more affordable. Also, the accuracy rates of object identification have gone very high in less than a decade, from 50 percent to 99 percent, which makes computer vision more accurate than humans at quickly responding to visual inputs.

The application of computer vision includes but is not limited to autonomous vehicles, facial recognition, Google Translate, real-time Sports Tracking and more. It has brought about propelling improvements in the field of crime prevention and security implementation, prevention of fraud in banking and financial services, predictive maintenance and product quality control in manufacturing, remote treatment to the extent of guiding complex surgeries and drug administration in healthcare and life sciences.

Listen, Decipher and Respond

One of the human skills that AI has mastered over time is the proficiency to listen, interpret, respond in accordance and even act as needed. This is the technology that empowers the AI voice assistants Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and many more to respond to your queries on best restaurants offering Chinese cuisine in your locality, weather updates, booking cabs or flights, etc. Security agencies and police forces are now using artificial intelligence to detect gunshots and bomb blasts, raise alerts and swing into instant action. Corporates are enjoying the effectiveness, accuracy and convenience with which artificial intelligence works in converting speech to text that finds a great place of honor in automated capture of meeting minutes https://www.voicea.com/.

Speak and Carry on Conversations

You may be enjoying Google Maps guiding you to your destination, while Alexa, Siri and Cortana get busy in satisfying your inquisitiveness. If you have tried out speaking with Google Duplex, you may have been overwhelmed at the flawless style of personification in too human-like conversational language. Duplex uses artificial intelligence to schedule activities and completes tasks over the phone. Organizations are using Duplex to perform screening round of interview and schedule following rounds.

Recognize Odor and Detect Health Issues

I happened to attend a recent event titled “Technology and Healthcare”. Guess what, I was amazed to learn from AI researchers that they are busy building AI models that will be able to detect health problems simply by smelling an organism’s breath. It can detect chemicals called aldehydes associated with illnesses and stress, including cancer, diabetes, brain injuries, and even detecting the woody, musky odor emitted from Parkinson's disease even before any other symptoms are identified. AI-powered bots are already in use which can detect gas or other caustic chemical leakages. International perfume manufacturing companies like Givaudan, Symrise and Danisco, to name a few are exploring the power of artificial intelligence to develop new flavors and fragrances.

Touch to Sense and Act

Sensors and touch screens are in some way using artificial intelligence to detect and act as needed. Ketchup manufacturing companies like Nestle, Heinz and Sing Cheung are using touch-enabled robots to identify the correct type of ripe tomatoes, pick them and even place them in a basket, ready to be moved into blending machines. As the Ai model is getting enriched by taking in more data each day, the robots are accelerating their speed of operations. AI mavens at Amazon and Google are considering the next steps in development to link touch with other senses.

Move to Catalyze Processes

Artificial intelligence propels all kinds of movement from autonomous vehicles to drones to robots. In fact, the United States is experimenting with drones to target enemy territories using artificial intelligence empowered smart weapons. Breweries are using robots in brewing beer.

Interpret and Analyze Emotions

Retail leaders like Walmart, Alibaba and Amazon are using artificial intelligence tools to interpret and analyze shopper’s emotions as they navigate through their stores. Market research organizations are using AI to comprehend the viewer’s emotions as they watch video Ads. AI has proved to be capable of gathering data from a person's facial expressions, body language, and more, analyze it against an emotion database to govern what emotion is likely being expressed, and then determine an action based on that information.  

Partner with Humans to Play Games

Artificial intelligence is being used in digital games such as chess, poker and Go.  and Go. In fact, AI can master these games and even beat human partners. Certain Sports Academies are opting for simulation of games using artificial intelligence to train better.

Deliberate, Analyze and Engage on a Topic

Technology leader IBM has built an AI model that helps in engaging humans to deliberate and analyze in order to interpret key points in complex topics. Named as Project Debater, the tool can research a topic, creating an engaging point of view and designing annulments against a human opponent.

Creative Pursuits

Artificial intelligence has proved to master creative processes and the portfolio includes making visual art, writing lyrics or poetry, composing music, and clicking photographs. Google's AI was even able to create its own AI-child, which outclassed human-created counterparts.

Read Human Mind

Artificial intelligence reading the human mind - do you believe it? It’s happening. AI can interpret brain signals and then convert into speech. Inspiring and life-changing for those with speech impairment, but slightly scary when you consider the mind-reading aspect of the skill. Some of the biggest tech giants, including Facebook and Google have their own projects in progress to explore AI's mind-reading ability.

Till now we have AI systems with specific skills. What if all these are combined into single artificial intelligence? Will it be a spectacular super-power? If ethical practices and governance policies are put into practice effectively, the day is not far when these powerful AI systems will induce multi-fold enhancement in our business practices as well as daily life.

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