Artificial intelligence or AI used to be the stuff of science fiction for ordinary folks. It is only in recent years that it has become a hot topic as technology has largely been integrated into our daily lives. AI is a technology that involves the use of machines or computers for tasks that typically would require human intelligence. It works by mimicking traditionally human functions like learning which allows it to discern patterns, helping it to decide and make judgments. While the technology is nowhere near as complex as human intelligence, it is able to process large amounts of data in a short span of time.
While the fear of AI taking over many jobs is a legitimate concern, we should not overlook the many ways in which we can take advantage of its capabilities. In this post, we’ll be talking about the top 5 ways AI can be used and is being used in different fields and endeavors.
AI in Business, Marketing, and Finance
AI technology has largely been used in e-commerce and marketing to learn buyers’ preferences and behaviors online. It allows businesses to target highly specific demographics, using people’s data such as browsing history, location, and other online habits. This is how our search results and the online ads we see are so tailored to individual preferences.
Businesses have also taken advantage of Natural Language Processing or NLP to power chatbots and virtual shopping assistants. These AI tools are able to provide real-time assistance and engagement through conversation that sounds quite close to a real human conversation.
Both the banking and business sectors, particularly e-commerce, are susceptible to credit card fraud. AI has helped in mitigating this prevalent issue using behavioral pattern recognition – tracking the behavior of a credit card owner and matching it with transactions to flag if any are questionable or suspicious.
AI in Creative Industries
Artists, graphic designers, writers, animators and other creative personnel can use AI to work through repetitive, laborious, and time-consuming tasks so they can get to the actual meat of their work. Photographers and graphic designers use AI to edit, resize, and boost photo quality in bulk. Animators and graphic artists can generate quick but detailed studies of concepts which are useful if they need clients’ approvals. Designers hoping to create unique seamless patterns quickly for backgrounds can use pattern generators like CF Spark Patterns.
While the ethics of AI art is still murky, especially when it comes to intellectual property, artists can still benefit from AI by using it as part of their own creative processes. For example, writers can quickly generate outlines for articles using text generators like to help them draft articles faster. Artists can experiment with concepts or brainstorm different ideas with AI art tools like CF Spark Art, DALL-E 2 and Midjourney. By making these preliminary processes faster, artists can then focus on honing their skills and creativity to bring their ideas to life in a more polished way.
AI in Education
Teachers can take advantage of AI in performing time-consuming administrative tasks like organizing lessons and grades, scheduling parent-teacher conferences, managing enrollment, among other things.
AI has also aided teachers in generating accessible course materials. Digitization of video lessons, modules, and conferences has made distance learning easier. Teachers can also maximize AI to generate video and audio summaries and transcripts of lessons.
On a more advanced level, AI can help teachers create personalized lesson plans based on students’ data. By using AI to track a student’s behavior and learning style, teachers can generate different teaching methods to aid in students’ learning. Apps like Knewton and Carnegie Learning are two such examples that adapt teaching materials to students’ learning styles.
AI in Healthcare
AI has proved revolutionary in the healthcare industry. It has largely helped in improving early diagnosis for chronic conditions, using pattern recognition. The development of new drugs and medicines has benefited from AI as well, using historical data and medical intelligence to make developments faster and more accurate.
AI robotics now plays a large role in healthcare, both in surgical operations, diagnostics, therapy, and palliative care. The development of surgical robots like the da Vinci Surgical System has made surgeries more precise and less invasive in some cases. There are also therapy robots to help improve the quality of life of patients with mental health conditions.
AI in Customer Service
The development of chatbots has revolutionized customer service in many industries. Aside from offering 24/7 assistance, its ability to converse naturally thanks to NLP has allowed companies to better engage with their customers. It’s not out to replace human customer service personnel. Instead, by taking on routine queries, it helps free up the time of CSRs so they can perform more complicated tasks that require a human touch.
Aside from performing routine customer service tasks, AI in customer service can gather data on customers to further personalize and improve their performance.
Learn How to Leverage AI in Daily Life
One of the primary concerns regarding AI is how it may soon render many jobs obscure, leaving humans jobless. However, there are still many tasks that AI won’t be able to perform the way a human can. For example, while AI language processing is indeed advanced, it still lacks the ability to discern nuance and other intricacies of languages. Anything that requires the understanding of nuance, subtlety, and imagination has yet to be perfected by AI. What workers around the world can do is use AI as a tool in their arsenal to help them perform their jobs more efficiently for the betterment of the community.
