The future of business in age of artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not a new thing in the world – it dates back to 1950 when Alan Turing introduced the new concept in his pursuit to crack the ‘Enigma code’. The term artificial intelligence was coined by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig in 1995, in their authoritative textbook, “Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach” used in more than 1,500 universities in 135 countries. Artificial Intelligence has gained more recognition in today’s technology thanks to advanced algorithms, data volumes, and improvements in computing storage and power, especially cloud computing and data management.

Artificial intelligence is the development of computational programmes that enable a server to perform in a better way. For example, speech recognition and conversion, word translation, visual perception, and decision-making are all things that would need human intelligence, but computers use their capabilities and intelligence to solve these tasks. Artificial Intelligence technologies vary from robotics to speech. We are witnessing AI applications in everyday scenarios such as online customer support interactions, building construction, book-keeping and auditing, financial services, fraud detection, investment forecasting, and retail purchase predictions.  The goals of AI include reasoning, learning, and perception. It has also gone to vehicle driving, marketing, agriculture, manufacturing, surgery, drug prescription etc.

Currently, it is pretty tough to discuss business development without considering artificial intelligence (AI), as it has become a red-hot topic in all the economic sectors globally. Many of us are ignorantly living with AI, multiple unseen algorithms that live on our devices, from smart-phones to self-driving cars and smart homes. Numerous technology giants have adopted artificial intelligence and many other businesses across the world are starting to embrace it. In a Global AI report by McKinsey & Company, 47 percent of companies adopted AI in at least one function in their business in 2019. In another technology survey in 2023, 42 percent of companies want to adopt AI in the future. AI is able to do works that anybody can imagine including sparring partners of table tennis, lawn tennis and boxing sportsmen. It can even act as personal assistants to chief executive officers and as chefs.

The global AI market is booming. It will reach $190.61 billion by 2025, at a compound annual growth rate of 36.62 percent. By 2030, Artificial Intelligence will add $15.7 trillion to the world’s gross domestic product (GDP), boosting it by 14 percent. There will be more AI assistants than people in this world. This is the challenge in the business world as more people will be replaced by AI in the near future. According to Brazilian-American researcher, Ben Goertzel, artificial intelligence or AI could replace almost 80 percent of human jobs in the coming years. 56-year-old cognitive scientist and famed robot-creator Goertzel is founder and chief executive of SingularityNET, a research group he launched to create “Artificial General Intelligence,” AGI, which birthed artificial intelligence with human cognitive abilities.

Goertzel said he does not think AI is a threat to unemployment. He claimed it was a benefit. “People can find better things to do with their life than work for a living”. German rail operator, Deutsche Bahn, and Industrial group, Siemens, launched the first automated and driverless train in the world on October 11, 2021. It is agreed that all paper works in business will be automatable globally. Unemployment issue that will be caused by AI, when AIs are relegating and ‘obsoleting’ one human job after another, is a temporary one. The benefits lie in genuinely assessing humans and robots contributions to business performances. We need to know which is smarter between artificial intelligence and human beings. If we want machines to really be as smart as people and to be as agile in dealing with the unknown, then they need to be able to take big leaps beyond their training and programming. Machines have not arrived yet. Human beings still have to do some jobs.

There are a bunch of benefits of artificial intelligence in business.  As appetisers, it helps enhance the consumer experience, enables rapid innovation, improves revenue growth potential, reduces human error, and creates smart operations. These factors will work well in countless companies and help businesses to stand out head above their competitors. According to a 2023 Gartner survey, the number of organisations that demand AI technology grew 270 percent in the last four years, and it was tripled in 2022. In addition, the 2019 CIO survey results confirmed that companies across all industries were running AI technology in numerous applications. A separate analysis by MarketsandMarkets (a Pune, India-based research firm) predicted that the artificial intelligence market will grow to $90 billion by 2025).

In the western world, most business organisations are contacting tech-specialists on how artificial intelligence will boost their businesses’ growth in both the short and long term. Their investigations mostly show that artificial intelligence can help in: automating routine tasks, freeing up employees to focus on more creative and strategic work, and make better decisions by providing accurate and timely data analysis. Improve the customer experience by personalising interactions and providing more tailored recommendations and support. AI will be able to analyse data on customer usage patterns, feedback, and preferences to provide users with invaluable insights necessary to create more user-friendly, engaging, effective products for invaluable customers. It will also help businesses speed up the product development process start-to-finish with rapid prototyping, especially in mass production.

Artificial Intelligence is not around to wipe out ‘our jobs’; it has come to complement them and make life more comfortable for us. Sophia is a humanoid robot and the first to be granted citizenship of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on the 25th October, 2017. The artificial intelligence robot has a life-like expressive face that can mimic human emotional expressions. It can also interpret sentences and context with a cloud connection and synchronise its mouth, face, and body when speaking. Robot Sophia can sell NFT artworks, but cannot perfectly act as company secretary. She can only assist in meetings by providing data and information to directors when required. Robots cannot record minutes as they need judgement as to what to include from meetings verbatim.