Last year an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system finally cleared the Turing test - a test where humans interacts with a machine and is unable to differentiate if they are actually interacting with a machine or a fellow human being. AI has become one of the most talked about buzzword right now. In this blog, I would be sharing my views as to how AI is going to shape enterprises of tomorrow in the near future.

I see four major pillars where AI would have a significant impact:

User Experience

Google and Baidu have developed complex AI systems that can distinguish several objects from a webpage. Very soon a new breed of smart assistants would rise who will define new capabilities for voice-based assistants. These assistants would be having a persona of their own and would be present for their users all the while. Delivery of services using these smart agents would be much more human-like and we would be seeing virtual agents move towards the agents like "Samantha" from the movie 'HER' as an end goal. We are already witnessing some serious feats by these agents where they are now predicting the outcome of competitive sports, all this being made possible with the development of technologies like NLP and ontologies.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

With the advances in AI, algorithms have become adept in extracting meaning out of unstructured data and ingesting the data. Certain specific business processes which are repetitive and have a definite pattern of behavior will certainly be automated. A good example is routing of service tickets in an enterprise. You actually don’t need a human agent to sit and route it and with the number of categories that are present, it becomes almost impossible to get the routing of tickets right in the first shot. While it is difficult for a human, this repetitive process can be easily automated by a service bot which can enable great accuracy and enable productivity gains. But RPA will not just impact enterprise hierarchy at the lower level. I feel that this is just a beginning and RPA will have much more larger impact even on higher end white collar jobs where, the ROI from RPA will be obviously much higher in this case. Let's take the scenario of a data analyst who builds models for predictive analytics. Considering the nature of his/her work, it is possible for the machines to develop the intelligence required to create the most optimal models, thereby doing a part of the work that a data analyst performs.

Internet of Things (IoT)

IOT market without any doubt is going to become a huge opportunity. With every passing year we are only seeing the numbers going higher up in terms of revenue opportunity. But enterprises would be able to only encash on this opportunity if they have a grip over the data and are able to generate meaningful insights out of the huge amount of data that these devices produce. While a lot of academicians suggests that analytics would play a key role in this, but I would say that the analytics powered by AI engines would be the key driver here.

Knowledge Virtualization

Enterprises are also enabling a new set of machines and bots that can enable knowledge virtualization, leading to huge opportunities in assisting users across domains. Machines will be able to ingest information from different sources. AI systems will be able to assist research scholars and help them enhance the output of their papers. Imagine a scenario where a capable AI system ingests all of the knowledge from research papers, it would become so much easier for research scholars to rely on these bots for citations. Law firms would also be a huge beneficiary of this form of AI engines wherein they would be assisted by these bots who will be much more efficient and relentless in pursuing the job assigned. And the result in this situation - the role of an associate might be eventually done away with in law firms.

We are living in a promising era and I feel that AI systems are going to redefine the way enterprises conduct their business. What are your thoughts on this? Are these the key pillars that will define the trajectory of AI?

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