The world is transforming and economies like India and China that remained undiscovered in early 90s, hold the potential to be discovered as growth stories and creators of asset class because of their ability to create unstructured data sets. Data is the next natural resource, like air, oil, water, and the convergence of Big Data and Cloud powered by AI and ML is a potential multi-trillion dollar opportunity.
Artificial Intelligence is no longer a theory, it is for real because of the availability of unstructured data, high bandwidth and affordable computing resources.
Discovering AI is the new normal
As the world transforms, businesses are going to need a lot of elements to implement AI. They need an element of Big Data and Cloud, then they need to manage data, followed by an ability to see panoramic view of data to innovate and help businesses leapfrog and most importantly, draw insights to take the decisions. Majority of the companies will not be able to articulate the problem or hire the people to execute.
There will be businesses with the resources and capital to get to decisions while some may still be finding the way to cross the bridge. Discovering the power of AI for your business will be the new impact. Gartner recently estimated that the term “AI” ranked seventh in the most searched terms. This is significant jump compared to January 2016 when “AI” was not even in the top 100 for the same category.
Artificial Intelligence is transforming the way businesses are defined, designed and delivered and enterprise value is captured. Asian economies like India and China are poised to leapfrog the world in Artificial Intelligence as the demography is not constrained by legacy usage of computers or tablets so they can move directly to the phone. Also, India and China are creating unstructured data at a very rapid pace and has datasets in volume that very few countries possess.
In the Asian context, India is a country with inefficiencies and lack of infrastructure in financial services, retail, education, health services, insurance and manufacturing. Most of these sectors have limited innovation in technology due to the majority of transactions being done in cash. Now, with the increasing adoption of digital currency, it will create a treasure trove of data in every industry. With incredible advances in Artificial Intelligence, India Inc. will have the ability to upend, disrupt and create industry-shaping companies from scratch. Mobility in India will drive digital adoption. As the next 700 million Indians get online – they will create data on how they live, move, transact and interact. This will in turn create opportunities in healthcare services, transportation, building better cities, retail, e-commerce and media.
As we approach this future, we will see startups and big companies alike take advantage of Artificial Intelligence to re-invent and innovate. The vision of Digital India requires considerable investment and a sustained push to create better infrastructure and development of talent to support this transformation. If we can combine the efforts in government policy and innovation that young Indians are creating today, India will leapfrog the technologies of yesterday and emerge as the engine of global growth.
On a larger context, application of Artificial Intelligence to cross-functional departments can generate insights adding immense value to in-grained business processes in terms of improving performance on a pro-active basis. For implementing Artificial Intelligence at an enterprise level, both AI and businesses have to ‘Think Big, Start Small and Act Fast’.
So, that’s the global context of what businesses should be trying to solve. The first thing is to capture the data and place it in databases that can handle that volume of data. This is not your traditional databases. The second part is how you analyse it. Today, the world analyzes it by brute force but tomorrow, we are convinced that the world will analyze large parts of data with Artificial Intelligence. Once you get to that point, the way we deal with information, the way the world works transforms itself. It is no longer is transactional, it is relationship.
Identifying hidden correlations is the aim of applying AI to business processes. Data-rich and digitally transformed organizations are going to have an advantage here compared to ones that are not capturing their data.
Former organizations should start understanding the power of AI and start identifying different processes in business units where they can maximize results with the usage of AI.
In the years to come, enterprises will scale new heights by exploring this untapped data and extract incremental value. AI powered by Big Data will affect almost all facets of our existence ultimately influencing the way enterprises chase growth, to positive effect.
Whether businesses are ready or not, AI is going to take us overwith its disruption and it is going to work in the favor of those who are better prepared.
This article is originally published in cioandleader.com.
