AI Articles and Analysis about Business intelligence and analytics

In a white paper about the digitalization of the chemistry and advanced materials sector published by the World Economic Forum and Accenture, total global chemical sales in 2014 amounted to $3.5 trillion and is expected to rise to $6.9 trillion by 2030.

While customer service is making its way to Facebook Messenger and other burgeoning platforms - a massive percentage of customer support inquiries are handled the way they have been for years: Over the phone or on chat.

The transportation domain is beginning to apply Artificial Intelligence (AI) in mission-critical tasks (for example, self-driving vehicles carrying passengers) where the reliability and safety of an AI system will be under question from the general public. Major challenges in the transportation industry like capacity problems, safety, reliability, environmental pollution, and wasted energy are providing ample opportunity (and potential for high ROI) for AI innovation.

Episode Summary: In this episode of AI in industry, we speak with Michael Johnson, the director of research and innovation for Interactions llc, in Boston MA. Michael explores the inbound (human to machine) and outbound (machine to human) applications of voice based natural language processing (NLP) and also talks about attaching a time-frame to how soon small and medium enterprises (SMEs) would have access to this technology in a financially sensible manner.

After a presentation at the Shop!Association’s national conference late last year, I had plenty of time to chat with retail business people about their own ideas about AI’s uses, and the trends that matter most. This prompted me to gather my thoughts and combine the ideas of retailers with the AI-in-retail research we’ve done, and put together a piece to help retail vendors make sense of the next 2-3 years of AI’s influence in retail.

Artificial intelligence has found its way in different areas in the entertainment industry from offering customized recommendations on your Friday night movies (as in the case of Netflix) to delivering sports match highlights during live TV coverage. In the latter, this was made possible in the 2017 U.S. Open Tennis Championships when IBM Watson Media used its AI tool to showcase play highlights right after they occur.

When we search on Google or Amazon, we’re reminded of the improved capabilities of artificial intelligence over the last half decade.
What we often don’t realize is the role that human beings have in tagging and manually working through near-infinite reams of data to develop genuinely relevant search.
Sure, data scientists and ML specialists must construct a search system - but for the time being - much of the “human-like” results that we get in the world of social media, search engines, and Commerce - comes from - well, humans.
This week on AI in Industry we interview Vito Vishnepolsky of ClickWorker. Clickworker is a large and well-rated microtasking marketplace. Clickworker cloud technology platform caters data management and web research services as well as AI algorithms training. The firm claims to have over one million workers on its global platform as of September 2017.
Vito’s perspective is valuable because he has a finger on the pulse of crowdsourced demand, handing business development for various crowdsourced AI support services - both for tech giants and startups.

Episode summary: Sales forecasting is big business. If you can better predict how much of a certain product or service you will sell in a given day, you can better stock inventory, better staff your facilities, and ultimately keep more margin in your business's accounts.