AI Use in Daily Life

Most people are unaware of the numerous ways that AI can be used in our everyday lives. From our personal phones to stock markets making millions of transactions every day, AI is the driving force behind many technologies and activities we take for granted. “Once people get used to the latest capabilities of AI, they forget that it’s AI,” says Gartner Analyst Svetlana Sicular.

Gartner is a research firm that advises companies on technology trends and adoption, and Poshmark is an online marketplace for new and second-hand clothing and accessories. Three leading AI experts—two from Gartner and one from Poshmark— weigh in on the many surprising ways AI surrounds us in our current day-today lives.

Svetlana Sicular researches AI and gives advice to companies on how to effectively utilize it in a corporate setting as a VP (Vice President) Analyst at Gartner. With all of the recent hype around AI, companies are often left wondering what’s possible and what’s not. Sicular states, “I speak with enterprises about how they implement AI in different circumstances…I help them find the right strategy for a specific situation.”

Sicular believes that the place where we encounter AI most often is on our phones. For example, things like autocorrect, speech and image recognition, photography, and social media feeds are all driven by AI. Furthermore, she makes a point that early COVID-19 vaccines used AI to get to market as quickly as they did, saying that “[AI] shortens the development cycle because it eliminates some dead ends. You can get through the stages much faster.”

Barkha Saxena is Chief Data Officer at Poshmark, an online retail company. Her company uses AI to determine the prices and discounts of products, as well as marketing promotions. In her words, “In my role, I manage the data from end to end. A big part of it is machine learning, AI, and data science.”

Daily examples of AI she cites include more familiar things like Netflix and YouTube recommendations, as well as less common applications like more intelligent medical diagnoses and autonomous vehicles.

Rita Sallam is a Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner. She’s interested in how data and analytics are being impacted by AI. “ChatGPT has been a huge market catalyst for AI.” This is because ChatGPT substantially increased the availability of AI to the public. She considers AI to be found everywhere, including, but not limited to, GPS, healthcare, and stock trading. Take it from the experts—AI is all around us. From everything we watch, to how we interact, to how our data is processed around the globe. As more and more AI gets embedded into daily activities, the less people think AI is something novel and different. It just becomes part of how things are done. AI is here to stay!