One of the most talked-about topics in the technology community these days is Artificial Intelligence (AI), and for good reason, too. AI is transforming the world today. In fact, according to various sources, the AI market was worth approximately $2.42 billion in 2017, and will potentially grow to be worth $18 billion by 2020.
While it is significantly contributing towards transforming traditional fields such as manufacturing, banking, pharmaceutical and insurance, its increasing application in unconventional fields like legal data analysis, intelligent document parsing, education, agriculture and surveillance is what amazes me. This paradigm shift in traditional operations is seen as a result of businesses continually transforming and reinventing their business processes. In today’s age of hyper-competition, it has become essential for organisations to digitally transform themselves to stay in the game.
To do this, a key differentiator that organizations must capitalise on is- data. With its volume and the information, it contains, data has immense potential to propel organisations towards growth. A core challenge in achieving this, however, is being able to effectively interact with this data and extract information that will help gain insights and make crucial business decisions. AI can help address this challenge, by driving interaction with this data, and hence enabling businesses to gain better insights and make crucial business decisions.
Thus, the adoption of AI is crucial to an organization to stay relevant and have an edge over competition. This shift, however, comes with its set of challenges essentially associated skills.
Skill sets will be needed in deep learning and machine learning models and their statistical concepts, which form the backbone of modern AI. Extensive experimentation and testing will need to be done before substantial value is created. AI strategies will have to be mapped inside existing processes to innovate and automate them. Therefore, developing a cohesive AI strategy with a persistent focus on innovation is the need of the hour for growing organisations.
