How artificial intelligence is transforming our work lives

How artificial intelligence is transforming our work lives

Artificial Intelligence has begun to impact our lives in myriad ways – through well­known assistants Siri, Cortana or Alexa, robo advisors providing automated financial planning advice, smart cooking systems with vision processors and much more. AI is now poised for wide­scale adoption in business leading to far and wide implications for how we work and live.

But what exactly is AI? Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the technology of creating intelligent machines that come closer and closer to imitating human reasoning and behavior. AI is a combination of different systems that can sense, comprehend and act. Often, the term ‘machine learning’ is used interchangeably with AI, however, machine learning is a core part of AI that focuses on designing computers that can learn from data with minimal programming or supervision.

As per IDC, the worldwide market for AI will grow to $16.5 billion from $1.6 billion in 2015, with a CAGR of 65.2%

Two main factors have fueled this growth in Artificial Intelligence: Computing Power – Machine learning requires enormous computing power and resources. Public cloud computing has provided cheaper and much faster computing power.

Big Data – AI needs a lot of clean and reliable data in order to produce results. As more devices around us get connected, the explosion in data generation continues with a CAGR of over 50%.

Artificial Intelligence Is Everywhere The use of AI is taking hold in diverse industries. AirBnB employs machine learning to match a guest with the best place to stay. Nasdaq tries to spot insider trading by using AI. Machine learning helps MasterCard detect fraud by going over billions of daily transactions. Google improves its search results by machine learning. Massachusetts General Hospital uses a system that pores over billions of images to determine CT scan anomalies. The examples just go on and on.

We take a look at the areas in which AI is being increasingly used: Home Automation – Too lazy to vacuum your living room or clean the dishes? Robots will do it for you. From temperature control to light activation and locking your home, AI is active in home automation space.

Environment – Environment sciences are proving to be big beneficiaries of artificial intelligence.

From species conservation to resource management, understanding distribution of phytoplankton in oceans (they impact carbon dioxide levels), and reducing chemical pollution, AI is leading to rapid advancement in environment sciences.

Transportation – While driverless cars have generated a lot of buzz, AI is also used for self­parking and driverless trains in many cities around the world.

Medicine – Ai is helping doctors in better detection of diseases to save lives. One example is a technique that can detect heart attacks before they occur. Artificial muscles are becoming smarter all the time. Robotic assistants are now assisting in surgery and AI software is parsing through massive amounts of health records to diagnose patients.

Productivity – Artificial Intelligence is helping us better manage our time and automate our tasks, particularly in the workplace. Indeed, the future of productivity will be heavily reliant on artificial intelligence.

AI & Productivity 80% of business leaders say AI­powered technologies create jobs and empower worker performance and efficiency PERSONAL ASSISTANTS There has been a race amongst tech firms in recent years to provide AI­based personal assistants.

Apple’s Siri, Google Now, Amazon Alexa and Microsoft Cortana are the assistants most people are familiar with. These assistants, with varying degrees of success, have been working to make our lives easier and more productive.

They can provide recommendations of what to watch on tv, give weather, sports and news updates, stream music, call Uber, provide directions, order pizza, and some can control your home devices.

The smarter assistants can link with other third­party apps. Most understand human language but not all can hold a conversation, much less a witty one.

There are assistants to help you with scheduling meetings, managing your calendar and building to­ do lists. Others are your personal health companions by helping you with healthy living throughout your day.

It is easy to imagine a future where AI­based personal assistants will be commonplace, taking over more and more of our repetitive, everyday tasks. They will be specialized, personalized, intelligent, and increasingly humanized.

WORKPLACE PRODUCTIVITY Artificial intelligence is boosting growth, not by substituting humans, but by creating new value through enhancing the skills and productivity of the existing labor force. AI has driven innovation and brought about ‘intelligent automation’ – in the process becoming a catalyst for rapid transformation in the way we do things.

As per Accenture, AI has the potential to boost labor productivity by up to 40% in 2035* We explore the key areas of workplace productivity where AI is being applied: Calendar Management – AI­based assistants are making a big difference when it comes to meeting scheduling and calendar management. Some of these are designed as chat bots or conversational agents that use natural language as an interface to receive your meeting request and negotiate a time for your meeting. This greatly reduces the hassle of scheduling meetings by eliminating the flood of emails back and forth. An intelligent assistant like WizCal suggests best time to meet by taking into account meeting context and preferences of participants, which are learnt automatically based on the usage of the calendar. WizCal assists sales teams by helping setup both internal and external meetings quickly and painlessly, thereby increasing close rate and the productivity of sales teams. These smart tools pick up your preferences and schedule meetings in a manner that makes the most efficient use of your time.

Email – Nothing sucks productivity quite like your email inbox, so it was only natural that this would be an area of focus for machine learning. Enter Inbox by Gmail that has introduced an AI­powered feature called ‘Smart Reply’. It quickly analyzes the content of an email and suggests three possible replies, all human­sounding. There is also ‘Notion’ an AI­powered services that solves email overload issues and gets smarter the more you use it. It figures out which emails you’re likely to ignore, which ones are important to you, tracks the responses you’re waiting for, and even snoozes emails.

CRM – Sales teams have a love­hate relationship with CRM systems and for good reason! While CRM systems are essential for managing a contact database and staying organized, they also need large investments of time to keep things updated. Enter AI with thoughtful solutions to make a sales team more productive. Tact bot is an intelligent assistant that helps complete a set of sales tasks through conversation as an interface to easily manage daily workflow.

People Analytics – One of the most comprehensive intelligent tools to emerge on overall work productivity is MyAnalytics from Microsoft. It has been designed as a personal dashboard that summarizes how you spend your work time – on emails, in meetings, working alone or even working after­hours. It then recommends changes you can make to work smarter and be more productive.

One example of how it works smartly is that it tracks your interactions with contacts and lets you know if you aren’t collaborating enough with a colleague with whom you’re working on a critical project.

Office Documents – Microsoft is doing more with AI. Office 2016 has several smart features based on AI. Take for instance Sway – a service that almost magically creates documents with very little effort. By typing a phrase, it will create a document outline with suggested sections, reference articles, content and even charts! Free images are available (sorted automatically based on your content) and can be added in a click. Different design layouts are also presented in a user­friendly way. It is hard to imagine that Sway won’t soon be impacting content creation in a monumental way.

What Lies Ahead As per McKinsey, 90­115 billion hours spent performing household tasks could be saved in a year in developing markets by 2025, equal to cost savings of $200­500 billion AI is poised to fundamentally reshape our world at an individual, enterprise and economy level.

Some of these changes will be large and visible while others will integrate into our lives in a way that we will become accustomed to them with little notice. Driverless cars will reduce congestion, reduce deaths, and give independence to disabled, elderly or even children. Drones will monitor large worksites and campuses, eliminating the need for physical surveillance. AI assistants will do our grocery shopping, clean the house, take out trash and send greeting cards on our behalf.

There will also be challenges – most notably how to navigate human job loss that will come about with exponential increase in the use of machines. There will also be social implications – perhaps deepening inequality.

What is clear is that our future will have AI embedded deep in our lives – saving energy, time, reducing stress and making us more productive.

About WizCal WizCal’s mission is to enable people and teams to find time for work that is important. WizCal is a complete solution for scheduling all your meetings, both internal and external. It is an enterprise class solution built to work seamlessly with standard calendars like Microsoft Outlook and Google.

A smart assistant powered by AI which schedules your meetings by taking into account not just your preferences and priorities, but also those of the participants in your meeting.

To Learn More Click Here.

SOURCES: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3081244/artificial­intelligence/these­three­virtual­assistants­point­the­ way­to­the­future.html http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2016/07/18/cio­explainer­what­is­artificial­intelligence/ http://www.martianherald.com/9­ways­artificial­intelligence­will­affect­our­lives/page/4 http://www.inc.com/john­brandon/6­amazing­ai­tricks­in­microsoft­office­that­will­make­you­more­ productive.html http://raconteur.net/business/the­rise­of­artificial­intelligence­in­6­charts