Artificial intelligence is ready for primetime

This month the McKinsey Global Institute released a discussion paper called "Notes from the AI Frontier: Insights from Hundreds of Use Cases" that measures the recent progress of artificial intelligence business applications and identifies industries and use cases where AI has the greatest potential to unlock value. There are a number of different'problem types' identified by the analysts, each of which are suited to particular deep learning or AI techniques. These problem types include classification (based on a set of training data, categorizing new inputs as belong to one of a set of categories), continuous estimation (based on a set of training data, estimate the next numeric value in a sequence), clustering (a system creates a set of categories for which individual data instances have a set of common or similar characteristics), optimization, anomaly detection, ranking, recommendations, and data generation. The two most important takeaways are that the best AI systems have consistently outperformed humans since 2015, and specifically in the transport and logistics industry, AI can improve performance over other analytics techniques by 89%. In other words, the technology is maturing and becoming commercially viable, and transportation and logistics stands to gain more from AI than almost any other industry.