How Artificial Intelligence will affect your life in 2018
What's the story
According to Pricewaterhouse Coopers report, using different data sets to make predictions, including predictions for shopping, is currently the biggest focus of Artificial Intelligence (AI) globally.
As machine learning, a subset of AI improves, wrong predictions and suggestions will become increasingly rare, and coupled with image recognition and search technologies, e-commerce will become more intuitive. But that's not all.
India stands to reap several benefits.
India & AI
Indian companies have a high AI adoption rate
A recent study of 993 companies across nine countries by Capgemini found that 58% of the Indian companies using AI have taken its application beyond just pilot projects, a higher proportion than any of the other countries surveyed including Germany, UK, Italy, and Australia.
The study found that telecom and retail companies had the highest AI adoption rate globally, followed by banking, utilities, insurance.
Governance
How machine learning and big data is changing governance
Big data analytics and machine learning are being increasingly employed by the government.
Reliance on geospatial analytics, which draws insights from remote sensing, satellite data, and machine learning, is an example of government use of AI.
Other applications include monitoring urbanization, tracking internal migrations, and authenticating income tax records.
Use of machine learning and big data is expected to find increasing use in governance.
Banking & finance
How AI is affecting banking and finance in India
Given India's massive linguistic diversity - 22 major languages and hundreds of other languages and variants - AI will eventually make the non-English speaking population's experience with technology more familiar and less cumbersome.
Banks and financial services are increasingly moving to AI to serve customers better.
For instance, banks like SBI and HDFC have already launched chatbots to handle customer queries.
Healthcare
The Indian healthcare sector stands to benefit substantially
The Indian healthcare sector stands to benefit substantially from advances in AI.
India ranks 154 out of 195 countries on a healthcare access index.
Advances in cognitive computing can, using extensive data, help estimate incidence of a disease in a particular population, and can help in providing cheaper diagnoses.
Recently, Google acquired Bengaluru-based Halli Labs, an AI start-up looking to solve "old problems".
Manufacturing
The digitization of manufacturing in India
Indian manufacturers are already using AI, AR, VR and robotics for better process optimization and customer care.
Use of industrial internet-of-things (IoT) and digital twin technology for improving operational efficiency, predictive analytics for preventive maintenance and supply-chain innovation, and chatbots for customer care are some examples of usage.
These technologies are expected to mature further in 2018 with cloud-based tech permeating into more areas.
Logistics
Machine learning to streamline the logistics industry
The logistics industry in India has been on a technology adoption spree, of late.
IoT and robotics to manage warehouse operations, real time tracking of shipments, automated storage and retrieval systems (ASRSs), RFID, GPS, cloud, and mobile tech are already heavily in use.
2018 is expected to see a rise in usage of machine learning tech for higher automation and streamlined delivery mechanisms.