How Your Business Can Benefit from AI


If your organization has some experience with machine learning, then you’re already familiar with the software’s application to tasks. For example, AI can be used to personalize marketing messages, understand your customer’s intent in the context of a website, or parse language to identify potential customer problems. Machine learning technologies also are being used in industries like health care and retail, to inform more detailed and accurate diagnoses and help companies reach and retain customers.

While most businesses are seeing the benefits of machine learning, not all organizations are taking advantage of it. According to Cisco’s Visual Networking Index 2018 Report, 28% of organizations have adopted machine learning and 43% have been using it for two years or less. In general, these early adopters are more active in generating insights about user behavior. However, once a company has machine learning, it will see value in using it to augment human resources and potentially even replace them altogether.

Importance of People

As machine learning becomes more prevalent, human expertise will become less important. Even more so if businesses adopt AI in an aggressive way. In this scenario, people will be less valuable to the organization.

A 2017 study by Cambridge University’s Computational Propulsion Laboratory found that a traditional programming model for AI is unlikely to continue to maintain human jobs in the long term. In fact, it predicts that future technologies will create fewer jobs than we have now, resulting in a net loss of 1.7 million jobs between 2018 and 2035. It predicted that those jobs most likely to go are those requiring human logic or creativity.

Workers whose jobs are valuable due to creativity or logic, and who will likely see a loss of employment, include teachers, journalists, social workers, lawyers, doctors, human resources professionals, engineers, and creatives.

A report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) also predicts that AI will have a significant impact on jobs, stating that it will directly affect 230 million workers globally, or about 47% of the total workforce in the next 15 years.

As a result of that impact, some employers are already changing their practices. For example, insurance companies have been merging their human workers with AI employees, resulting in a decrease in the workforce.

Customer Service AI

However, in certain situations, the roles of human workers will be more important than ever. For example, if the goal is to reduce costs or if there are extra variables, like the weather, people will need to be involved.In these scenarios, even if you have few employees, you may still benefit from adopting a specifically targeted iteration of AI, like AI customer service. Consider an insurance company. If they determine that more variables affect the cost of insuring your house, then human employees will be able to help determine the most affordable price, but seldom would they be able to do so efficiently while also accounting for more-than-satisfactory customer service. This is a step that they may have previously overlooked, but one which is now at the core of their corporate planning considerations.