Last month, I was arguing with one of my clients. During the discussion, I discovered that cloud and SaaS applications have changed the business landscape and helped business owners. After the cloud ERP solution, my client was saving about $2,000 per month by not having hardware and its maintenance, IT people, etc.
I was wondering how artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) could change the lives of business owners and industry. Today we see them in all stages of our life, but we cannot distinguish them separately. They are part of our life.
How AI and ML are disrupting the industry?
AI, in the manufacturing industry along with IOT tools, suggests CNC machines what to produce, when to produce, and how much to produce. This has improved efficiency and the use of machines, labor, etc. The production line has become fluid without many surprises as ERP and IOT meet demand and supply as this decision information is passed to different touchpoints that would execute the same thing. Define a few standard patterns and the rest is done automatically. Hardware and its preventive maintenance are controlled and AI maintenance, problems and maintenance of your data center are affected.
AI and ML are changing the way we buy items, make sales, buy rentals or sell houses, etc. Even dating apps are helping many to find suitable partners. AI and ML’s control Amazon’s book recommendation, Google suggests correct information or promotes ads, etc. The labor market is shrinking. Much mundane work is replaced with technical tools.
AI and ML have improved the lives of online shoppers with correct messages, supporting information on additional items, etc. Now ML automatically learns user patterns and suggests what to buy. These tools have helped many online e-commerce businesses target products to the right cohort of Customers and get more information about their clothing purchase, when and where they can shop, etc.
Based on your “social” credit history, few companies help you get loans or guarantee you get a home, etc. (Ant Financials)
AI tools have also disrupted the agricultural sector. Activities that are too sensitive to data, hard to sit down and analyze have now been streamlined. Now we can measure and monitor crop yield, productivity, soil fertility and lack of nutrition, etc. Many agritech companies rely on AI and ML to feed the data to the algorithm and see what happens.
How is our personal life interrupted to make it simple?
Previously, we used to hail taxis on the road or call taxi companies to book a taxi. Now we use apps and no more stops on the road. UBER, Ola, GoJek have changed the need to have a car and pay maintenance. The money savings is huge considering the savings on car maintenance costs, insurance and parking charges, etc. This reduced highway traffic and blockages during peak hours, saving millions of dollars in fuel costs.
Google is launching the driverless car economy. AI supervised learning helps check car movement; your surroundings, nearby cars or any other vehicles, etc. This is helping to protect passengers and other surrounding property. UBER is already talking about buying these cars for its fleets and also developing its own self-driving cars.
AirBnB and Oyo have increased the quality of hotel experiences, while driving prices down. OYO redefined the hotel end-user experience by raising the bar for rooms and services. Guests are guaranteed to receive the same treatment at multiple hotels. Now a day customers do NOT check the name of the hotel and its credibility etc. The customer is checking whether the hotel is rated by OYO or not. This ensures the quality and minimum standard of services.
Many big companies that do not own anything, but control most of our lives.
1. Uber, Ola – Car service company, which integrated distributed taxis
2. AirBnB and Oyo: Helped integrate smaller hotels and improve customer experiences.
3. Google – Search engine and ads
4. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud – Provides the infrastructure to manage and run your applications at a fraction of the original cost of purchasing a server.
So what is going on here?
Many IT jobs are already suffering. Development tools are reducing the number of developers needed, Selenium-like tools are replacing manual testing. We’ve created the tools that reduce web application testing time by 80%.
But the side effect of this is that many have lost jobs and income-generating opportunities.
How does machine learning work?
If you see the business above, they don’t own any property, but they control the activities as they use AI and ML that feed the information back to the app. One of the ways ML works is that it needs a lot of transaction data to analyze and come up with and learn from patterns.
For the machine learning algorithm to work, a lot of data and feedback is required to create its own patterns, test, learn, and implement new ones. Many healthcare startups are using AI and ML to scan the digitized reports and feed the data to AI and recreate the models to analyze.
