As artificial intelligence at various levels becomes embedded into more parts of our personal and professional lives, it’s easy to take those changes for granted. I’m reminded of this as I listen to my next-door neighbour’s robot lawnmower as it trundles around during the day, making all the correct turns.
The Benefits and Challenges of AI
The benefits, or perhaps more importantly, the potential benefits of AI are immeasurable. Smart devices like my neighbour’s lawnmower, robot vacuum cleaners and voice-powered homes can make everyday tasks more convenient and efficient.
While the features of these devices are great, there can be occasional issues when AI fails to work properly.
For example, I recently played golf with the proud owner of a “follow me” trolley. It works fine most of the time, following you with your clubs and then stopping alongside the ball at rest. Its embedded GPS capabilities not only calculates the actual distance for your next shot, but adjusts the yardage based on the elevation of the pin relative to your ball. (I wonder if future developments might have the trolley taking the shot?)
But it still requires attention. The user needs to be aware of its intended path and what obstacle lies between them and the trolley. From my experience, it doesn’t account for bunkers, lakes and other people being on the route, which can lead to safety hazards, at worst, or inconvenience, at best.
AI’s Impact on Business Expansion
At TD SYNNEX, we have been building our AI-based partner ecosystem for more than four years. We have helped develop AI solutions for healthcare, retail, manufacturing and supply chain. The early explosion of AI was in the startups and entrepreneurs recognising niche opportunities in which the founders had market knowledge and expertise.
Today, the major vendors have recognised that AI is no longer a niche play and will make organisational changes and adjust their acquisition strategy accordingly. If everyone embeds your underlying technology into their solutions, you can win every time. AI has become the new operating system war and the new browser competition.
A recent announcement by Gartner indicated that CEOs are throwing money at AI for FOMO (fear of missing out), which is also indicative of the growing impact and the need to be seen to be responding to the market.
At the market analyst perspective, we use terms like Natural Language Processing, (NLP), Machine Learning (ML) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to help define the market size and growth. But what does this mean in terms of new products and solutions?
AI’s Role with Security and Networking
In the IT industry, AI will play an ever-increasing role in our network and systems security. As businesses and our on-line lives continue to be challenged by threat actors, we will need to implement more AI-based solutions to predict, detect and protect our IT environments.
IBM’s recent acquisition of Polar Security exemplifies the recognition of AI’s importance in data security posture management. Their agentless, automation-driven platform, quickly discovers data, including sensitive and unknown data, across multiple cloud platforms. As cybersecurity was the largest area of mergers and acquisitions in 2022, it’s safe to expect more announcements from other vendors in this space during the year.
AI’s Influence in Marketing and IT
Where marketing meets IT, we are already seeing generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, reduce the time it takes to produce written and visual content. On social media, we have seen short films scripted and produced by giving generative AI a briefing on what the film should be about. Example: (163) Last Stand | Sci-Fi Short Film Made with Artificial Intelligence — YouTube
Customer service is a sector in which AI will have a significant impact. If implemented effectively, it can improve response times, increase customer satisfaction and boost organisational reputation. It is also a target area for large staff reductions; at the time of writing, BT have just announced that 55,000 jobs will be reduced over the next 6.5 years with AI replacing 20% of those, and mostly in customer services.
As a customer, service calls with AI chatbots can go one of two ways. Customers are likely to have a positive experience and return in the future if a call is answered quickly, your question is understood and you get a response you have confidence in. By contrast, if AI is only used as a call holding facility, asking questions as part of advertising a range of other services, chances are you will request to speak to a human very quickly.
Other benefits from using an AI chatbot for customer services include:
- Offering a 24-hour service
- Customer look-up from the incoming number
- An ability to reference previous calls, and whether the case was resolved or still outstanding
As avatar voices become more human and chatbots demonstrate emotion and intonation within a meaningful conversation, this will undoubtedly be the future of call centre services. Today, if we add generative AI and provide the bot access to relevant data sources, we may be closer than we realize.
The Transportation Sector is Being Driven by AI
Other industries where change will have a major impact include the transport industry. Autonomous vehicles are changing jobs and lives, but they face technical, safety and legislative challenges.
The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) defines six levels of driving automation ranging from 0 (fully manual) to 5 (fully autonomous). These levels have been adopted by the U.S. Department of Transportation:
- Levels 0–2 stipulate that the human is in control and monitoring the driving environment.
- While in 3–5 the vehicle is doing the monitoring.
- However, it is only at level 5 that the vehicle is in full control of the driving environment.
The UN estimates that 1.3 million people die each year on roads around the world and up to a further 50 million suffer non-fatal injuries. However, introducing connected and automated vehicles into an existing population of non-autonomous vehicles makes little impact until the percentage is significant (likely around 40%, according to experts). These vehicles will still require a level of human override in certain conditions. Safety evaluation of connected and automated vehicles in mixed traffic with conventional vehicles at intersections: Journal of Intelligent Transportation Systems: Vol 25, No 2 (tandfonline.com)
AI Making Strides in Other Industries
This is not an exhaustive list of industries that will see impact. Financial services, for example, have been using AI in fraud detection and risk analysis for many years, reducing their number of back-office staff.
Autopilots were first introduced into planes in 1912 and in 1947 the first autopiloted plane flew the Atlantic, including take-off and landing. Although there are only two humans, pilot and co-pilot, flying our passenger planes today, how would you feel if there were none?
Technology could replace them. In fact, Swiss bank UBS estimates that removing humans from the commercial cockpit could produce savings upwards of $35bn (£28bn) annually. That figure would undoubtedly boost profits — assuming of course, we all still wanted to fly!
Critical Considerations for AI Implementation
What becomes apparent from examining industries and the potential use cases for AI, is that it is not simply about the technology being able to improve something, but it’s a question of, “can AI based solutions be implemented in a commercial and sustainable way?”
Few opportunities will arise where there can be a hard cut over. A rip and replace. AI solutions need to integrate with existing processes, customs, cultures and traditions. People need to understand where they fit in this rapidly changing world.
But AI is no longer sneaking up on us, but rather leading the way and challenging established practices across industries. It’s out in front and challenging the way we do everything, asking “why do you do it like that?”.
We will need to get better at finding the answer — or AI may just find it for us.
