What are the Markets Drivers, Restrains and Opportunities of AI?

Companies across the world are increasingly turning to Artificial Intelligence implementation for their smooth business operations. The technology has become very constructive in performing a wide range of tasks that are complex and cumbersome for humans, bolstering employee productivity. The use of AI can also aid enterprises to combat cybersecurity risks and thwart them from potential data breaches. With the growing capabilities of AI across diverse business functions, here are the key driver, restraints  and opportunities AI presents.

Market Drivers

Enterprise Adoption of AI

Enterprises nowadays are investing heavily in AI technologies to unleash the power of their business. They are adopting the technologies to perform tasks ranging from planning, envisaging and predictive maintenance to customer service chatbots and more. As more and more enterprise tasks will be performed by AI, companies can see a huge transformation in their businesses and drive efficiency. Though businesses are in the early stage of AI adoption, they are yet to learn how to implement this technology to get the most out of it.

Rapid Surge of AI Applications

AI has been around for several decades transforming all aspects of businesses and lives. The current surge in AI research and investment has given the incredible rise in AI applications. These applications do not just promise to yield better business outcomes but enhance the human experience as a whole. The technology is currently being applied for a wide array of industries ranging from healthcare, retail and food tech to banking, logistics and transportation. Applications of AI have also expanded to real estate, entertainment and gaming in recent years, and are expected to develop further in the coming years.

Customer Experience

AI is capable of improving customer experience as it is rapidly transforming the way companies interact with their customers. To enhance efficiency and ability to deliver services, companies are invested in customer service AI solutions. Key players in the customer experience field are also looking for AI to augment intimacy in order to understand customers profoundly, drive customization and create personalized journeys.

Business Development

Artificial Intelligence has a positive impact on the development of a business. The greatest potential value AI offers can influence both top-line-oriented functions, such as marketing and sales, and bottom-line-oriented operational functions like supply chain management and manufacturing. The technology is not only proving beneficial for large businesses that seek to obtain high competitive gains, but small businesses are also being benefited by better strategic development using AI.

Enhanced Cybersecurity

The increased proliferation of technology in the last few years has given the rise of a new threat landscape, forcing businesses to explore advanced defensive strategies. By integrating the power of AI into cybersecurity, security professionals will have a powerful resource to safeguard vulnerable networks and prevent potential data breaches. AI can significantly draw instant insights, resulting in lessened response times. This disruptive technology has the ability to assess user behaviors, infer a pattern and detect all sorts of irregularities in the network, making it much easier to identify cyber vulnerabilities quickly.

Market Restraints

Undoubtedly, AI has a huge potential to transform industries and provide decision-makers with opportunities to drive improved business excellence. This is why the technology is being admired from every type and size of business and acknowledged as the most innovative and advanced technology of the 21st century. It has affected our lifestyle either directly or indirectly and is likely to take over some major everyday tasks in the near future. As AI is continuously revolutionizing the real world, it has some of its limitations.

Data Quality

The prediction power of an intelligent algorithm is highly dependent on the quality of the data fed as input. Even in quality sources, biases can be hidden in the data. The time and effort required to glean and prepare an appropriate set of data should not be underestimated. In the self-driving automotive industry, for instance, most of the effort is spent on labeling hours of videos. This has led to the creation of an entire offshore industry for video labeling. Conversely, in the financial industry, the reconciliation of the data from front to back is already problematic, and data referential are often plagued with quality issues. Having an effective data quality program in place is a prerequisite to any large-scale artificial intelligence initiative.

Black-Box Effect

The results of intelligent algorithms are opaque and not verifiable. They deliver statistical truths, meaning that they can be wrong in individual cases. The results could have a hidden bias difficult to identify. The diagnosing and correcting of those algorithms are very complex. This is majorly because there is no explanation as to why the algorithm provided a positive or negative answer to a specific question that can be disturbing for a banker's rational mind, for instance. This is often a blocking point for the use of AI in trading.

Building Trust

As AI is becoming more and more pervasive in today's information age, there is a concern over how people can trust that it reflects human values. Somewhere AI has not been able to build trust among people. People who are completely unaware of this technology and don't understand how it is being used by companies to make a decision find themselves in difficulty to comprehend its functioning.

Data Privacy and Security

AI can be the best defensive technology in a company's cybersecurity arsenal and, thus, it is becoming increasingly integral to information security. AI impacts nearly every aspect of people's lives and uses in multiple of applications. However, AI is no longer placed solely in the hands of the good, as malicious actors are adopting technologies such as AI and machine learning faster than security leaders. The use of these technologies by cybercriminals can have a pessimistic impact on all businesses seeking to protect their most precious asset, data.

Algorithm Bias in AI

AI systems are dependent on what data we put into them. By putting bad data, they can create implicit racial, gender, or ideological biases. But this is the fact that most AI systems will continue to be trained using bad data, making this an ongoing problem. Since more and more companies are looking to deploy AI systems across their operations, being acutely aware of its bias and working to minimize them is an urgent priority.

Market Opportunities

Like many new technological breakthroughs, the full potential of AI will also be realized slowly, and it only takes someone exploring the possibilities around them to find out something new. Its potential has already delivered significant advantages to businesses at large creating huge opportunities for the future. AI offers vast opportunities for automation and digital transformation. It won't eliminate jobs anymore right now; it will upgrade them. By eliminating some of the menial, monotonous and repetitive tasks, it will free up human employees to apply more creativity and human judgment.

A majority of organizations that have already begun the transformation to AI now are looking for ways to obtain repeatable value. They are continuously going to be better placed to maintain their competitive edge over their peers. Credited to its huge advantages, many businesses are already started hiring devoted professionals to have their own AI-based apps. Artificial intelligence can drive a significant return on investment by managing and maximizing businesses' marketing strategies. It can help monitor, analyze and understand customer data across all the channels, assisting in better decision making.

Embedding AI throughout the enterprise will considerably allow business leaders to automate, stimulate and enhance key business processes to transform at scale. It will also enable them to keep track of what a business's competitors are doing. Successful implementation of AI products will perform more for a company. As our future is likely to rely on AI, a person should spend less time looking at screens while computers do things for him/her automatically. Integrating AI will also redefine a company's product roadmap.

It is expected that AI will bring more personalized conversational interfaces that make a person's interaction with a computer less stressful by making it feel more like a conversation with a friend or colleague. These conversations can be held through voice or text, just like human to human conversations.

Most importantly, using AI will be benefited in taking advantage of large amounts of online as well as offline information to make informed, data-driven decisions that will make a business grow. AI-driven tools can be fitted in every data producing workflow and deliver insights that are quite applicable and actionable as well.