Ben Dracup, Minty Digital: What Is The Real World Impact Of AI?

Ben Dracup, SEO Manager at Minty Digital, explores…

 
While accurately charting the future growth of the global artificial intelligence (AI) market can be challenging, there’s no doubt that this sector will expand exponentially in the coming years.

According to Next Move Strategy Consulting, the value of this market reached $142.3 billon last year. However, it’s poised to grow rapidly over the course of the next seven years, increasing twentyfold before peaking at $2 trillion in 2023.

This rapid growth is likely to be driven by increased rates of adoption across multiple industries, with a huge number of AI-inspired startups continuing to disrupt different marketplaces.

According to Forbes, there has been a 14x increase in the number of active AI startups since the turn of the century, delivering far greater investment and innovation within the marketplace. But which industries are being most affected by AI, and how exactly is this technology making its mark?
 

Finance and Forex Trading – Using Past Data to Inform Future Trades

 
AI has begun to have a significant impact in the financial markets, especially across speculative asset classes such as forex.

If you’re signed up to the best forex trading platform or resources online, you’ll have already seen the impact of AI on the collation and analysis of historic data, with subsets such as machine learning and deep learning particularly prominent.

The combination of these tools allow for the analysis of huge swathes of data from even unstructured sources, including social media. Such insight can then be utilised alongside more traditional data sources such as news articles and economic indicators, enabling traders to make more informed real-time decisions and mitigate potential risks with greater efficacy.

In the case of machine learning, this has improved the process of learning from or identifying trends in past data, providing enhanced predictive analytics that can be delivered in real-time.

Put simply, the application of AI and its subsets lets you leverage past events to inform the future, without compromising on the speed or accuracy of your market analysis.

Of course, AI also allows for the live tracking of market sentiment, which will actively enhance practices such as social or copy trading and further narrow the gap between experienced and aspiring investors.
 

IT and Customer Supportare Also Major Beneficiaries of Artificial Intelligence

 
A more obvious beneficiary of AI is the field of information technology (or IT), which primarily deals with the processing and management of data within organisations.

Certainly, a growing number of IT service providers have already embraced AI to help deliver technical support resolutions, with one study suggesting that as many as 44% of global companies have taken this step.

AI is ideal for the purpose of creating smart and real-time IT support, especially in relation to common queries and system issues. It can also easily distinguish between this type of request and more complex alternatives, optimising the workload that’s placed on corporeal staff members and representatives.

Even on a fundamental level, AI is being utilised to automate internal system updates and upgrades within a company’s network, while also improving security protocols and ensuring that employees only use approved programs and software.
 

 
Customer support, which helped UK call centres generate a total of £2.5 billion in 2022, leverages AI in a similar way. More specifically, AI and machine learning principles underpin so-called “chatbots”, which can handle generic customer queries in real-time and ease the burden placed on human agents.

Technology within this space has recently been advanced through the emergence of ‘ChatGPT’, which uses natural language processing to simulate more intuitive human conversation and actually compose relatively complex written content. While such technology has its limits, it has the capacity to improve chatbot interaction and the full scope of this feature online.

AI, Automation and the World of Manufacturing

The manufacturing industry has changed markedly throughout the digital age, while becoming less prosperous as developed nations such as the UK have gradually evolved into service-based economies.

Some things never change, however, with manufacturing still characterised by incredibly complex and time-sensitive processes and tiny profit margins. In short, there remains very little room for error when manufacturing goods, while optimising volume remains central to long-term growth and profitability.

These facts alone make manufacturing a natural application for AI, which can automate specific tasks, mitigate the impact of human error and drive incremental efficiency gains (and greater profitability) over time.

AI certainly plays a critical role in automation, while its ability to collate and analyse even complex datasets in real-time enhances practices such as quality control.

Make no mistake; quality control has a significant impact on a manufacturer’s ability to optimise both volume and profits, while reducing the rate of return and the number of defects per shipment.

By deploying AI software and advanced camera or computer vision technology, it’s possible to process a high volume of consistent visual inspections that don’t rely on human interpretation. At the same time, staff members can be asked to complete more strategic and often better paid tasks, including supervision and the management of automated processes.

AI software also underpins a concept called ‘predictive maintenance’ in manufacturing, which relies on specific tools to monitor the machine data produced by complex and often costly production devices.

This data can then alert staff members to potential issues pertaining to functionality and safety, ensuring that affected machines can be immediately serviced before they break down completely and find themselves in need of a total repair.
 

The Last Word

 
Ultimately, a seemingly endless array of industries are being directly impacted by AI, with principles like machine learning and sophisticated natural language processing having a highly disruptive influence across the board.

This trend shows no sign of abating any time soon, with AI is set to impact an even wider range of applications as the underlying technology continues to evolve and enter the commercial mainstream.