The potential of artificial intelligence in the consumer products industry

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of several disruptive technologies that consumer products' companies can deploy to further advance their journey to digital maturity. AI technologies "perform and/or augment tasks, help better inform decisions, and accomplish objectives that have traditionally required human intelligence, such as planning and reasoning from partial or uncertain information and learning."1 As such, AI technologies can potentially strengthen a company's competitive advantage in the marketplace and enhance the customer experience. Figure 1 explores several potential use cases of AI that are applicable to the consumer products industry. They are arranged based on the main categories associated with cognitive technologies: robotic process automation, language technologies, machine learning, and computer vision.