AI Articles and Analysis about Automation and robotics

Applying AI to the real world is much more difficult than applying it in digital ecosystems; this is what makes robotics use-cases in business so much more difficult than applications such as AI-enabled fraud detection.

The retail and eCommerce sectors were among the first to adopt natural language processing (NLP) in the enterprise, particularly by way of chatbots and conversational interfaces. In this article, we cover three ways retailers can use NLP to automate business processes and offer the customer a better experience. We also give examples of AI vendors that offer this technology and describe their products. The NLP capabilities we discuss include:

The military is always looking for ways to innovate its technology for weapons and vehicles, and it follows that AI and ML would become part of that work in the current decade. Currently, the Army is testing autonomous vehicles and aircraft for battlefield use. However, most AI applications for these vehicles do not have clearance to operate the weapons attached to them. 

Although it's apparent that AI development is slow-moving in the industry, food and beverage companies may be able to use AI for food processing, in particular:

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) of the U.S. Department of Transportation recently released an overview report on the current state of self-driving technology.

The idea of using artificial intelligence (AI) in the military scares many people in the US, especially when it comes to the Army. The US Army typically operates on the ground, and so it may be uncomfortably closer to home for some people.

The Chinese military, or People's Liberation Army, is focusing heavily on artificial intelligence. However, China's race to develop "smarter," cheaper AI technology for the military is not linear, but instead a many-pronged strategy that involved the central government, domestic companies, and international trade. Gregory Allen of the Center for a New American Security published a report on China's AI strategy, in which he said:
Chinese military leaders increasingly refer to intelligent or “intelligentized” military technology as their confident expectation for the future basis of warfare. Use of the term “intelligentized” is meant to signify a new stage of military technology beyond the current stage based on information technology.
He also reported that “total Chinese national and local government spending on AI to implement these plans is not publicly disclosed, but it is clearly in the tens of billions of dollars.”

Government contracts are notoriously hard to acquire. It takes many months of painstaking work to get through the gamut of regulations that weigh about 8.5 lb when printed out. Startups and small companies, including those developing artificial intelligence, often do not have the resources to compete for a share of this market. The US Air Force is changing that by streamlining the process in what it calls Pitch Days, the first of which was on March 6 and 7, 2019 in New York.