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Basic Introduction

Simply put, Artificial Intelligence means development of computers and automated systems that are able to perform things normally done by human beings – in particular, things associated with people acting intelligently. It can also be described as a sub-field of Computer Science that emphasizes in the creation of intelligent machines that work and react like human beings. Some of the traditional and long-term goals related to Artificial Intelligence for which computers are specifically designed include:

• Natural Language Processing
• Planning
• Learning
• Knowledge Representation / Engineering
• Reasoning and Problem Solving
• Motion and Manipulation – Robotics
• Social / General Intelligence

An inter-disciplinary science, Artificial Intelligence has multiple approaches though it is noteworthy that advancements in machine learning have created a Paradigm Shift in various sectors of technology. There is a constant fear in our minds that the human race can be in danger by the creation of machines that are far more intelligent because it is intelligence in itself that makes human beings unique from others. However, this is far from the truth and most of the fears are just the creation of the human mind. Artificial Intelligence is just an augmentation and enhancement of the technological process aimed at benefiting us by  making our technology far more efficient and speedy. So the very concept of Artificial Intelligence according to researchers is nothing more than the conclusion of faster computing abilities in order to improve the lifestyle of human race in a far befitting manner.

Global Overview

Corporate organizations in every industry can achieve tremendous benefits under the application of Artificial Intelligence. Accenture Research, as per their latest report, compares the Economic Growth of 16 industries thereby projecting the impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on Global Economic Growth. In this report, they have applied Gross Value Added (GVA) as a close approximation of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the study has confirmed that the potential for economic growth increases drastically upon the integration of Artificial Intelligence into the economic process. The findings of the study are noteworthy and state that Artificial Intelligence has the true potential to increase economic growth by a weighted average of 1.7% across all industries through the year 2035. Financial Services, Manufacturing and Information & Communication are the three sectors that shall achieve the highest Gross Value Added (GVA) growth rates by an increase of 4.3%, 4.4% and 4.8%, respectively. The bottom-line is that Artificial Intelligence has the key potential to boost profitability by an average of 35% by the year 2035 and thereby leading to a 14% economic boost across 16 industries, globally.

Artificial Intelligence Revolution goes Mainstream

Artificial Intelligence has entered the consciousness of every industry for the past few years. Businesses of various magnitudes have started considering Artificial Intelligence in solving various business problems. Earlier, only large corporates or organizations could afford investing in Artificial Intelligence but now the scenario has changed rapidly. Now startup companies and smaller organizations can embrace this technology for solving their in-house business issues along with the large corporates. AI can be used to resolve problems within the corporate board. Artificial Intelligence can help businesses improve customer experience,automate work processes, detect fraudulent transactions, increase sales and provide predictive analysis. Industries like financial services, health care, logistics and automotive have a lot to gain by implementation of Artificial Intelligence. By arming Health care service providers with better tools for early diagnostics using AI will be very effective preventive mechanism. AI based process automation can prove beneficial for financial services as well as for fraudulent transaction detection. Companies doing logistics can improvise their delivery management system and better their inventory cay utilization of Artificial Intelligence. The retail business can map consumer behavior using Artificial Intelligence. Usage of smart grids and smart meters by utilities can lead to decrease of power consumption which shows how cost-effective the application of Artificial Intelligence can prove itself to be in the industrial sector.

The bottom-line is that Organizations be it small or big has fully realized the potential of Artificial Intelligence in their day to day functionalities. Implementation of machine learning improves the efficiency of the organization. Intelligent systems can automate a great amount of your work and help reduce the risk of human errors. They can be rest assured of better outcomes by making the systems smarter, faster and cost-effective, in the long run.

Benefits & Applications

Finance & Accounting: Artificial Intelligence plays a vital role in private wealth management as well as in the functioning of key banks that comes under the sector of finance. Important data such as financial statements, media related articles and posts can be converted into a more comprehensible and easily understandable format for human study. It can assess mass amounts of such data thereby reducing time and making it convenient for easy application as and when required. Human workers could take considerable time that could  extend from days, weeks or even months, whereas the application of Artificial Intelligence could make the same process happen in say hours or even minutes. When it comes to running through difficult and sensitive tasks that requires utmost care and attention, such as handling customer complaints / inquiries and evaluation of customer authenticity based on credit scores, the application of Artificial Intelligence could reduce the time taken, drastically. According to Accenture Research, based on Forbes, 80% of Finance and Accounting shall be delivered with automation by the next few years.

Prevention of downtime and other failures: A company that manufactures a particular product and supplies a resource must ensure that there are no shutdowns which are unscheduled that could result in serious downtime. A few examples are sawmills, timber yards, hydroelectric stations etc. The machines and systems inside a factory or station needs to be turned off or shut down temporarily in order to repair and replace non-functioning or damaged parts. The production or manufacturing outlet then fails to generate revenues due  to such unprecedented shutdowns or technical failures. Alleviation or reduction of such downtime and mechanical / technical breakdowns is possible by the effective application of Artificial Intelligence within the Industrial or Manufacturing units. By doing so, all the key parts that are vital for effective and efficient running of a plant, factory or manufacturing unit becomes possible in no time. The core mechanical components or parts that are important in the smooth functioning of a facility or production unit can now be assessed beforehand thereby enabling smooth, unhindered and error-free running via application of Artificial Intelligence. This could enable the management to instruct the factory workers to fix or replace faulty parts in advance and thereby ensure that the generation of revenues by the company isn't disrupted by any means.

Automated Virtual Workforce: Every organization, whether small or big requires a workforce that can suite their profile and cater to the services being provided. This is the case whether a company has five or five thousand employees. Each employee is supposed to finish a certain job based on his or her designation / capacity during a specific time-period but a company could fail to achieve the required number of tasks per day due to limited time and convenience of it's task-force. Further, this could create a real strain among the employees and such stress among the overworked individuals could also compel them to quit the company for good in search of better work environments. Such stressful work-environments could also take a toll on the health of the employees within a company. This is where Artificial Intelligence could act as a catalytic boost by faster delivery and completion of the otherwise repetitive and dull jobs. Mundane processes can now be taken care of by automation and workers or employees can then be assigned tasks of higher priority. The morality of the employees can also be boosted by offering them far more vital and key positions to be handled. While not exactly a realistic replacement, a virtual workforce could prove to be an excellent additional bonus for a company and its staff. By doing so, manufacturing units and other companies shall be able to divert and focus their attention on quality production and growth on a futuristic note.

Manufacturing Products: Before manufacturing a particular product, people need to design, create and test the same for functionality. This process is not exactly cost-effective and could eat up time and effort at an alarming expense. There is also a disadvantage that products can be created or manufactured only one at a time per worker as is the case with non-automated manufacturing units. Application of Artificial Intelligence in the manufacturing industry carries umpteen number of benefits such as creation of superior products with smarter design, better safety standards for the benefit of the employees and drastic reduction of down-time. The top management has now fully realized the true potential of Artificial Intelligence in increasing the overall productivity and growth within an organization. Artificial Intelligence applications can ensure that a company doesn't fail itself due to heavy competition from similar production houses or outlets. Further, these applications can also help mold a company in accordance with the needs and whims of a dynamic market by real- time assessment, analysis of the mechanical parts and machinery that are so much vital for effectively churning out need-based, quality products.

According to a recent insights survey by Forbes, 49% of individuals from the manufacturing and automotive industries have emphasized the critical significance of Artificial Intelligence whereas 44% considers it's role as highly important in order to ensure sure-shot success by various companies in a competitive environment.

Customer Service: Corporate Companies and organizations fully realize the importance of Customer Service and how it can influence its reputation. If anything goes wrong in the manner how customers are treated, the state of existing affairs can really get bad. Various instances wherein the sales go down due to declining customer visits to online outlets or stores because of poor Customer Service experience have now a become common scenario. It is to be noted that most people are not really keen or interested in interacting or conversing with a machine that isn't smart and resent being continuously transferred or referred to another machine, multiple number of times. They in fact prefer to speak with a customer service agent instead. Smart applications such as Chatbots can effectively analyze customer data and offer smart insights that could assist customers in an efficient manner. Such applications or solutions can help in integrating customer support with resources such as Salesforce, Zendesk and Magneto and could also make you available on different messaging platforms such as Skype, Facebook, Whatsapp etc. Application development companies (eg, Chatbot) are also in the process of integrating Artificial Intelligence in order to additionally include "Emotional Intelligence" for more smarter and effective customer experience thereby bridging the gap between an organization and their customers.

Information Technology & Security: This sector utilizes Artificial Intelligence in the best possible and efficient manner. According to a recent survey conducted of 835 companies by Tata Consultancy Services, 44% of them are using Artificial Intelligence for detecting and tackling security breaches, 34% for product management work by applying automation and 41% for resolving technology related issues. As per Gartner, by the year 2020, at least 75% of software tools for security shall have prescriptive and predictive analytics based on Artificial Intelligence, heuristics and machine learning algorithms. These days, smart solutions are available for combating malware threats by proactively preventing them from happening rather than combating them reactively.

Business Management: Artificial Intelligence helps in managing Business Development activities such scheduling conferences, team meetings and also supports in decision making. Now a days, various Business Management software are coming up which provides outstanding features for a particular business thereby improvising the outlook and efficiency of a Business Concern. In accordance to recent estimates, it has been projected that the spending on decision support shall increase in the coming years and become the part of top Information Technology industry expenditure by the year 2025.

Human Resources: Screening potential candidates, scheduling a face to face interview thereby picking the right choice for an Organization becomes faster and smarter with Artificial Intelligence based applications. The actual process otherwise by a HR Manager or personnel is very laborious and tedious and the application of Artificial Intelligence can make things really smarter and exciting for them as well for the Human Resource department in an Organization.

Marketing & Sales: Earlier it wasn't possible to apply Artificial Intelligence in the Sales & Marketing department in an Organization which can described as one of the key areas in ensuring success in a business venture but now you can do the same with ease. These days, Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning based solutions are readily available in order to reach out to the right audience or customers. Based on demography, these apps can help the business organization to effectively advertise in order to tap the right customer base for boosting their profits and sales. These advertisements can be optimized in accordance with various audience or customer groups across different platforms thereby helping the company or organization to reach out to diversified customers in accordance to their choice.

Note: Organizations should focus in speeding up their business in a manner by imbibing and taking advantage of the latest technologies developed by various companies based on Artificial Intelligence in order to boost their business in a proactive manner. Automated key solutions can simply processes and can help the organizations to save man-hours with ease and efficiency. Unless and until a business enterprise evolves and adapts with the  latest  trends in technology it shall fail to stay alive in competitive market.

An Effective Management Approach

• Artificial Intelligence should be approached by  organizations as an instrument to expand their business thereby creating new products or services, winning more market share and increase productivity. It can also be rightly tapped as a tool for effective cost-cutting. Instead of focusing on the ability of Artificial Intelligence to help cut costs, the companies should be able to forecast and envision the potential of growth by investing in Artificial Intelligence on a long- term or futuristic note. The idea is "Planning for Growth not just Cost-Cutting".
• Companies committed to adopting Artificial Intelligence need to ensure that their strategies are transformational and should make Artificial Intelligence central while revising their corporate strategies. The organizations should therefore remain open in revising their strategic corporate goals.
• It is worthwhile to note that Artificial Intelligence works the best when it has real-time access to large amounts of high quality data and is integrated into automated working process. So the focus should be to rely on a "Solid digital foundation".
  
• Artificial Management technology management requires and should involve new leadership skills including those required to implement modern processes embedded within it. The companies which are successfully embracing Artificial Intelligence should be committed to transformational programs with their top management ready to embrace the new change that comes with it. The cross- functional management teams should also be ready to redefine their activities and processes in accordance with this change. The idea is to invest in both Technical and Managerial Talent capabilities for efficient functioning.
  
• Development of Artificial Intelligence ecosystems can be nurtured by business leaders in their communities by encouraging supportive Government Policies. Governments have other important tools to foster AI ecosystems. They can act as lead customers, ensuring that regulations are friendly and supportive to Artificial Intelligence. Further, more useful data can be made available by the Government departments both by opening up their own data and by establishing standards that make data readily available thereby ensuring protection of an individual's privacy.