Nothing Artificial About AI’s Attractiveness to Business

Infosys has released a large survey on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI). The major takeaway from the survey is that the companies that have enjoyed financial success recently are those likely to be ahead in AI deployment. The implication is that smart companies think that AI is a winner.

The survey, Amplifying Human Potential: Towards Purposeful Artificial Intelligence, included input from 1,600 senior business decision makers. The tie between success in the recent past and excitement about AI is clear:

“Organizations who report faster growth in revenue over the past three years were also more likely to be further ahead when it comes to AI maturity,” the press release says.

Respondents seem to accept that AI is a big part of their future:

AI is perceived as a long-term strategic priority for innovation, with 76 percent of the respondents citing AI as fundamental to the success of their organization’s strategy, and 64 percent believing that their organization’s future growth is dependent on large-scale AI adoption. While there are ethical and job related concerns – 62 percent believe that stringent ethical standards are needed to ensure the success of AI – most respondents seem optimistic about redeploying displaced employees with higher value work.

The press release offers a summary of findings, including the fact that organizations that have or plan to deploy AI expect a 39 percent average increase in revenue and a 37 percent reduction in costs by 2020.

The fast and deep acceptance of AI by industry is also the theme of a post today at Forbes by Gil Press, who quotes numbers from Narrative Science, Forrester Research and IDG. They all point in an upward arc, including the prediction by IDG that AI’s market value will grow from $8 billion last year to $47 billion in 2020.

Press listed what to him are the top 10 AI business applications. They’re all already established in business, or on their way to being so. Thus, it’s not hard to see why the growth will be so fast. They are: natural language; speech recognition; virtual agents; machine learning; AI-optimized hardware; decision management; deep learning; biometrics; robotic process automation and text analytics and natural language processing.

The ways in which AI works will improve as it burrows deeper into the enterprise. Entrepreneur suggests that AI has solved, or is close to solving, several challenges that slowed its progress. For instance, systems will soon be able to learn without human oversight and think abstractly and creatively. The result, the piece suggests, is that AI will provide better tools and analytics, and enable personnel to be redeployed and better solve customer needs.

AI is here to stay. Indeed, its acceptance in business will accelerate as time goes on as the systems get ever-more clever and independent.

Carl Weinschenk covers telecom for IT Business Edge. He writes about wireless technology, disaster recovery/business continuity, cellular services, the Internet of Things, machine-to-machine communications and other emerging technologies and platforms. He also covers net neutrality and related regulatory issues. Weinschenk has written about the phone companies, cable operators and related companies for decades and is senior editor of Broadband Technology Report. He can be reached at cweinsch@optonline.net and via twitter at @DailyMusicBrk.