Artificial intelligence (AI) is a term you must have heard, even if you are from the IT world. AI is when machines and computer systems simulate human intelligence processes. Right now, AI is literally taking over the world – at least 90% of tech giants invest in it. According to the Data and AI Leadership Executive Survey, the number of AI-friendly companies participating in the survey has doubled in one year. Another survey states that half of the interviewed companies use AI. Some more specific applications of AI include expert systems, natural language processing, speech recognition, and machine (computer) vision. The latter type of AI – computer vision – has already been integrated into road traffic, bank payments, and social networks. For the last decades, AI vision has learned to solve many tasks with an accuracy reaching the human one. "As many others have noticed and pointed out, the neocortex has a highly uniform architecture too across all of its input modalities. Perhaps nature has stumbled by a very similar powerful architecture and replicated it in a similar fashion, varying only some of the details. This consolidation in architecture will in turn focus and concentrate software, hardware, and infrastructure, further speeding up progress across AI. […] Anyway, exciting times." Many companies have started using computer vision in artificial intelligence tasks.

Computer vision applications have become ubiquitous nowadays. It's hard to think of a domain where the ability of computers to "see" what's going on around them has not yet been leveraged. Delivering process automation and accuracy, computer vision technology is expected to have even greater momentum due to the COVID-19 pandemic as organizations have rushed to adopt automation on a larger scale. More nuanced use cases of computer vision in different industries are also predicted to emerge with the next evolutionary leaps in artificial intelligence development, a field computer vision is part of. Let's take a look at inroads already made by computer vision, its vast applications in different industries, and benefits.