Artificial Intelligence: Trouble or Opportunity?

Artificial intelligence (AI) works as the driver of exponential economic value creation by making its way into our lives. You can assume the development of AI through Amazon's Alexa and Facebook's M to Google's Now and Apple's Siri and thus you can track your future growth, incredible opportunities and expected problems.

Today, you can take the example of IBM's Watson. Watson is a question-answering computer system which can give answers to questions created in natural language, hypothesis generation and evaluation; and dynamic learning that is developed in IBM's DeepQA project by a research team led by principal investigator David Ferrucci. Watson was named after IBM's first CEO, industrialist Thomas J. Watson. Watson is a cognitive computer that learns over time.

Currently, cognitive computing helps human beings in their decision-making process in different areas, such as health care, travel, and weather forecasting etc. As IBM obtained ''The Weather Company'', journalists tried their voice for fun. It has been seen that its demand is increasing highly. The data collected from the fourth most-used mobile app would stimulate the appetite of the permanently famished IBM Watson and allow IBM to boost the level of analytics for its business customers.

There are many businesses whose growth is highly dependent on the weather. Some companies have suffered huge losses of $500 billion a year due to weather. For example, Pharmaceutical companies depend on perfect weather forecasts to expect an increase in the need for allergy medication. Similarly, farmers often depend on the weather for growing of crops, harvesting, and selling. Therefore, IBM acquired Merge Healthcare Inc. for $1 billion so as to combine its imaging management platform into Watson, and the vigorous future of AI becomes more noticeable.

Additionally, the accounting industry can also get benefitted from AI. Some researchers advise companies to partner with IBM to have Watson and learn all of the global accounting guidelines. As a result, they could renovate their practice and get a lot of benefits. You can take the example of KPMG team which after enough research did an alliance with IBM's Watson unit to develop high-tech tools not only for auditing but also for other areas of business of it.

Thus, the cloud and the virtualization of services have helped every organisation irrespective of their size to gain a benefit in this space. Achievement of success solely depends on the innovative use of new tools.

Advanced AI is capable of providing huge possibilities which will facilitate businesses in every ground to make better decisions in comparatively lesser time. But how much it costs? According to many, the technology will bring huge job cuts all through several industries and will lead to more unemployed people.

It is essential to identify how the technological setup is working smartly before our eyes during this digital revolution. It has been seen that hundreds of traditional jobs are reducing. At the same time, we should appreciate the wealth of new roles and the rise of employment opportunities which are required to help us develop more.

The rise of the machines commenced with the abolition of recurring tasks, for example, those in the manufacturing environment, and now it is affecting administrative jobs more. The major thing is that we should not react to change but to get ahead of it by getting alerted to "Hard Trends" — the things that are shaping the future. Thus, we can all foresee the problems and new opportunities before us. We would do well to take advantage of the areas in which computers have great difficulty understanding, including communication, collaboration, problem-solving, and much more. To continue ahead of the curve, we have to learn new things continuously and unlearn the old methods that are now holding us back. We also have to be aware of the new tools available to us, and then innovatively apply them to renovate the impossible into the possible.