siliconindia | | February 20179AI as an indispensable tool for supporting humans in virtually every aspect of life, especially in commercial applicationsSome Applications of AI in the Fu-ture Could Be:Virtual AssistanceThe first and most obvious way to use artificial intelligence is for virtual as-sistance. Many have already had the experience of speaking into a phone to search for answers to basic ques-tions, like who invented Electricity or a sum of two numbers or directions to the nearest Petrol Pump. It's become so commonplace that we rarely stop to think that it would have seemed like science fiction a decade ago.Generating InsightsData has been called the new oil be-cause it is essentially the raw material of the digital economy. What used to be trapped in a vast maze of incom-patible database and protocols or worse, filing cabinets is now quickly becoming a fungible commodity that can be accessed by new technology platforms like Hadoop and Spark.Yet much like oil, data is largely useless without effective machinery to transform it into something of val-ue. That's the role that machine learn-ing is starting to play. Today's systems can not only take in billions and bil-lions of data points and analyze them in minutes, they can also learn from the data and get better over time.Automation of Manual ProcessesOne of the constants throughout the rise of technology is the automation of work. First came labor saving ma-chines such as tractors and home ap-pliances, and later industrial robots and basic systems to automate things like travel reservations arrived. Today, more advanced robots are even able to work alongside humans in factories.Unlocking Unstructured DataTraditionally, almost all of the data we analyzed was structured data, the kind that gets captured and stored in a da-tabase. So we were reasonably good at deriving insights from data gener-ated for that purpose, like sales from a cash register or answers to a con-sumer survey, but almost everything else got lost. That's a bigger problem than most realize, because structured data represents only a small part of the information available to us. In fact, it has been estimated that 80 percent of digital data is unstructured.Finally, what makes artificial in-telligence systems so powerful is that, unlike purely statistical approaches, they can learn. That allows them to adapt when market behavior changes as well as continually improve perfor-mance as more data comes in. We are entering a new era of cognitive col-laboration in which machines become far more than just agents to perform tasks, but help us to understand the world and make better decisions. Bhavin Asher
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