Artificial Intelligence in everyday life
Artificial intelligence (AI), nowadays present in many everyday applications, has just reached a milestone in research centers. “AI now outperforms people on unexpected tasks such as winning a poker tournament, sharpening an image in detective series or conducting a fluent conversation” says David Bariau, Partner at Alcimed.
David Bariau encourages us “not to feel threatened by AI, but on the contrary, to rely on it in order to gain autonomy and performance in our sectors of activity.” Among the many emerging uses, the industry has a lot to gain in this field.
AI has numerous applications in the healthcare sector. In the upstream stages of pharmaceutical R&D, AI will soon be able to simulate the human body and its responses, but also adapt existing treatments or propose candidate molecules and targets to treat a certain disease. All that will be done “simply” by analyzing and connecting the tens of thousands of publications and patient records already available. IBM and Google have already established many partnerships with pharmaceutical groups or hospitals with this objective. In the general practitioner’s or specialist’s office, AI can provide diagnostic decision support, in particular by analyzing radiological images or by performing an exhaustive analysis of all past and present patient data: biological analysis, symptomatology, patient records, and comparing them to millions of similar cases.
In the B2B or B2C commercial sectors, AI will be able to provide outstanding support in sales and marketing. Some online banks already use such algorithms to fully customize their offers and humanize themselves by using chatbots: AI-powered conversational agents. In fashion, AI can recommend product combinations: buy a dress and the AI will offer you matching shoes. With recent developments in image analysis, it could even make it possible to read customers’ emotions as proposed by Affectiva and adapt its approach and offer in real time in order to optimize sales. This software is already used to optimize ads, video games or movie trailers. Prototypes allow you to customize fragrances by analyzing the emotional reactions of the customer subjected to multiple samples.
Finally, in the industrial sector, AI is getting more and more involved in issues related to reducing energy consumption, and undoubtedly represents a technological brick of interest for the plant of the future (preventive maintenance, optimized logistics flows, etc.). GE has recently opened a dedicated laboratory to integrate AI into its future industrial software.
“In summary, the field of AI is in full swing and technical issues have been solved. The future is here and the remaining question is to know what use of AI you will make in your profession”, adds David Bariau. “This is a crucial question for our customers to answer. Only a limited number of people have real expertise in AI and companies need them to stay competitive,” concludes David Bariau.