Artificial Intelligence Will Change the Workplace Quicker Than We Think

Business adoption of artificial intelligence is accelerating, fueled by an explosion of data, the rapid growth in cloud computing and the emergence of advanced algorithms. In a survey of IT decision-makers that my company, CCS Insight, conducted in July 2017, 58 percent of respondents said they are using, testing or researching the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in their organizations. Respondents also estimated that as much as 30 percent of their business applications would be enhanced with machine learning within the next 24 months -- a bullish view, considering the technology's well-documented problems with trust, cost and the lack of skills needed to train machine learning systems. Speech-based and image-based cognitive applications are emerging at an accelerating rate for use in specific markets, such as fraud detection in finance, low-level contract analysis in the legal sector and personalization in retail. AI is also beginning to appear in systems designed for corporate functions such as customer service, HR, sales and IT.