AI is talked about a lot these days. And these risks downplaying its potential as just another buzzword. AI can be described as a digital brain i.e. a piece of software that is “intelligent”. It has been with us since the 1950s but in the last few years its adoption exploded. And there are clear good reasons for that:
a) we have more readily available data to train these digital brains
b) processing power is cheap and readily available
c) we have a lot of readily available products, services and algorithms that make the adoption simpler, faster and better than ever before
AI in business is used in many ways. We can classify the uses as follows
1. Forecasting
– Sales prediction (demand prediction) – how much am I going to sell this Black Friday, this Christmas. When will my sales start ramping up? i.e. by when do I need to have the items in stock? (for inventory optimisation)
– Predictive maintenance
– Predicting a price in the future (for price optimisation)
– Predicting delays in time-sensitive processes like logistics
– Customer churn prediction
– Credit scoring
2. Personalisation at scale based on customer profile and buying history
(hyper-personalisation)
– Customer segmentation
– Recommendation systems – suggesting the product/service the customer would be most interested in
– Customisation of the product/service itself
– Marketing of the product/service – such as targeted emails
3. Automation
– Automation of manual processes (digitisation)
– RPA (robotic process automation) & intelligent OCR can user to automate manual task like dealing with inputting forms, invoices and HR documents. Very useful when you are suffering from an information overflow in your business.
– Driving (autonomous vehicles)
4. Anomaly detection
– Defect detection in product manufacturing
– Fraud detection
– Suspicious behavior
5. Natural language processing (read text, hear speech and interpret it)
– Chatbots – that can answer the most common questions like “What are your opening hours?” “Do you have vegetarian options?” “Is there a parking area?”
– Sentiment analysis
– Virtual assistants
– Interpreting legal contract and handwritten documents
6. Image Recognition through Computer Vision
– Identifying the age, sex, and mood of customers – leading to customer profiling – from CCTV cameras.
Uses in the industry are wide and diverse. Here are 5 popular uses of AI in the industry:
If you read the above, it all makes sense but do not know where to start then you should take this journey of using AI gradually – step-by-step. Make sure you keep some basic rules in mind.
Finally, a small word of caution. Onboarding AI-based solutions does some with its own set of. The main three challenges being
We hope this blog post help you understand better the opportunities (and the challenges) of on-boarding AI solutions in your business. If you have any comments or questions, feel free to send them over. We are here to help.
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