AI is revolutionizing the industry. Here’s what’s in it for you:

Artificial Intelligence is an extremely new and powerful tool. Since the term artificial intelligence is so broad, its benefits can be seen in many industries. Also, due to the nature of AI and machine learning, there is little limit to the capabilities of this tool.

Businesses are really taking advantage of all AI had to offer. In fact, McKinsey estimates specifically AI techniques could make between “3.5 trillion and $5.8 trillion in value annually across nine business functions in 19 industries”.

However, what’s in it for normal consumers?

In this article, we will present the full potential for AI in the years to come. It has already seen immense success in a vast amount of industries such as marketing, journalism, healthcare, and retail. And, more importantly, we will show you everyone, not just companies, how they will benefit from this breakthrough technology.

Marketing

Marketing might seem like the most obvious industry because the AI techniques are used to market to directly to the customer. This can be done in many ways, the few being giving you personalized ads based on your recent searches and also providing recommendations once you are on their website.

Recently LeSportsac, New York accessory company that is part of the ITOCHU group, chose to invest in using AI to evaluate who specifically shops their e-commerce. Simply through looking at purchasing patterns, AI can see into the psyche of a company’s customers. It can figure out not only who is buying and why, but also who is not buying and why. In the past, this was a guessing game, but through AI all that chance is taken out of the equation of marketing.

Now LeSportsac is able to adjust their website and products in real time due to trends detected through those programs.

For you: This investment directly benefits the customer, because now the marketing campaigns are more customized for them. It streamlines your shopping experience making it easier to find the products you will love by providing smart recommendations and discovering related products.

Journalism

Journalism has been around for many years and has already evolved so much but one thing has always remained constant, the reporters. However, within the last decade, AI is advancing even this aspect of the news.

Most recently The Washington Post, a major newspaper company based in Washington DC founded in 1877, wanted to grow their sports column but didn’t have the manpower or funds to support such change. They were able to solve this issue by purchasing an AI program called Heliograph. Once given a few keywords and the proper data, Heliograph can write and publish an article in near real time.

Since the launch of the program, it has been used for many events that needed to be constantly reported, such as the 2016 US Presidential election.

Through the help of these “newsbots,” the general public can be updated on major events within minutes of them happening. It also minimizes the biases of different newspaper or reporters, thus making the journalism industry more equitable.

Facebook also has been using AI technology to filter through fake news articles. At the moment, they are using a semi stance based algorithm to detect these hoax stories. Furthermore, they have hired a third-party nonpartisan Fact-Checker Network. This algorithm is said to have decreased their fake news by 80% so far. Finally, they bought out a London based AI startup, Bloomsbury. This technology will use machine learning to understand unstructured documents and answer any questions about the said documents.

For you: In the past few years, there has been a large increase in the amount of fake news generated. A huge source of those articles popularity is from Facebook recommending them. Through the use of Bloomsbury AI techniques, Facebook users will be getting news that is filtered to have only the most reliable articles.

Healthcare

Since universal healthcare is such a controversial field, it has been a large focus for AI technologies. There are many ways companies have been targeting the healthcare system. This can be seen through huge companies such as Google X when they were creating a Nano pill to detect cancer back in 2015. Although that product has yet to be officially launched, another company, Babylon was successfully launched at London in November 2017.

Babylon is an AI-driven health advice application. The application filters through 13 billion variations of symptoms by asking a series of questions. It can tell you if there is something potentially serious to get checked out by a doctor. If so you can schedule a meeting with a doctor and even order prescriptions for you if necessary.

For you: This program has completely revolutionized the industry by allowing equal healthcare to the public for free! Also, this application of artificial intelligence is available at your fingertips which means no more long lines waiting for appointments.

Retail

Retail is an extremely competitive field, so companies must stay at the frontier of selling strategies in order to remain relevant. Most recently AI dynamic pricing and demand prediction has been at the forefront.

Dynamic pricing is the based on the idea of maximizing economic welfare. That is the sum of merchant profit (number of sales * margin) and consumer surplus (number of sales * savings). This ensures that both parties benefit from the optimal price, not only retailers, thanks to an optimized supply-demand curve.

A key factor in the definition of economic welfare is the number of sales. That is, of course, decided by the target market because after all, they are the ones purchasing the product. This is known as “consumer sovereignty,” meaning that through dynamic pricing the power to price the product is now with the consumers.

Consumers literally vote which is the best price by purchasing the product at the said price. The more popular prices are favored by the AI since they provide the maximum profit for companies.

Dafiti, a leader in fashion and retail in Latin America, uses Optimus Price to predict the demand for their products and choose the prices which favor economic welfare. These prices are not only the most popular amongst consumers, but also provide the maximum profit.

For you: This novel approach to personalized pricing is respectful of consumer privacy and does not use personal data to provide recommendations, thus being compliant with the even the strictest EU privacy laws.

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence was introduced in 1956 and since has been able to accomplish so much success in a wide range of industries.

Thanks to the power of current computers and an increasing amount of available data, AI applications have been growing quickly in the latest decade.

It has completely revolutionized the consumers shopping, news, and healthcare experience. Since it is still such a new and rapidly growing industry, there is still much more it can do.

AI can be very confusing because there are so many different types of AI in many different industries. But, the one thing you must take away from this article is AI is helping you in more ways than you may know and will only continue to help you more in the years to come.

References

Facebook fact-checking:

• http://www.kdd.org/exploration_files/19-1-Article2.pdf
• https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/21/facebook-expands-fact-checking-program-adopts-new-technology-for-fighting-fake-news/
• https://www.forbes.com/sites/samshead/2018/07/03/facebook-is-reportedly-buying-a-london-ai-startup-for-over-20-million/#97e73ec3cf2f

Journalism and AI

• https://www.wired.com/2017/02/robots-wrote-this-story/

Economic Welfare

• University of Amsterdam paper, by Zuiderveen and Poort, “Online Price Discrimination and EU Data Privacy Law”, J Consum Policy (2017) 40:347–366. DOI 10.1007/s10603-017-9354-z

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