The drive towards a totally interconnected world through AI is pushing big companies like Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and IBM into increasing competition as investors lunge at the opportunities and unimaginable benefits presented to businesses of all kinds. Smart technology is here and every industry is taking advantage of the benefits provided by AI assistants and the AI/Cloud tech partnership, which allows companies and especially small businesses to thrive even in a saturated and highly competitive market run by giant monopolies.
Machine Learning is the main spearheading process that along with Natural Language Programming (NLP) is helping AI understand more about human language and behavior as well as open sales questions. By imitating the neurological functions of the human brain it is able to recognize sentence structure, phraseology (through Semantics technology and cognitive intelligence for example) and extract/process meaning from all the information available on the world wide web, in order to then deliver personalized solutions to consumers and businesses alike.
AI can thus predict changes in customer demand or satisfaction and avert a crisis before it develops, while recommending the best business strategy for the case at hand and rearranging the supply chain cycle according to the patterns it is able to recognize (such as supply/demand and cost risk factors); in order to enhance productivity, reduce bureaucracy while lowering unnecessary costs, and also discover previously unknown strategies and intel from multiple fields of human knowledge.
Through Text Mining, AI algorithms sift through all the available data online including Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), recognizing patterns in consumer behaviour or business data and delivering it to the appropriate department. OSINT is comprised of everything from information found through social media to virtual libraries, news reports, e-mails, business/ government papers, academic journals, etc.It is used for intelligence gathering purposes by intelligence agencies as well as Governments to help prevent a national disaster or crisis through a real-time analysis, tracking and monitoring of social media, blogs and sites in order to respond faster in emergency situations. In fact, it is after all used in the global surveillance (and hacking) program of the CIA and NSA as well.
As well as this, focus on Emotional Learning (AI’s ability to recognize and portray human emotion) is quickly achieving increasing and as the creator of Sophia the first robot citizen, states- AI is bound to achieve full self-consciousness within the next few years (if it hasn’t already).
The possibility of Virtual Reality conferences and Mobile Offices are expected to largely get rid of the physical Office space entirely, as more and more companies migrate their data and IT resources to the Cloud via Servers hosted by third parties or installed directly into the company’s IT network. The promises for the future are many but it is also true that Artificial Intelligence is a constantly evolving market and companies need to become acquainted with the basics of AI/Cloud computing and all the numerous AI applications so they can choose the best ones which work for them depending on their individual business needs.