Artificial Intelligence Creeps into the Commercial Market Despite Initial Hurdles

September 8, 2004

When artificial intelligence (AI) was developed to emulate human intelligence, scientists hoped it would be a blockbuster technology. Instead, the inability of end users to deal with its complexity and expensiveness and their lack of understanding of its potential caused these expectations to dwindle.
These factors slowed down the adoption rates of AI, but not the efforts of researchers. After a couple of decades, AI, now in the form of applications, is slowly making its way out of laboratories into the mainstream market.

Some technologies such as case-based reasoning solutions have already created a buzz in the market with multi-applications in the fields of drug discovery, medical diagnosis, fraud detection, data mining, and knowledge discovery. Another promising commercial avenue for AI is in enabling radiation-based food and water sterilization technologies with sensing systems.

“In future, AI is likely to be incorporated in several products to make users’ lives easier,” says Technical Insights Research Analyst Amreetha Vijayakumar. “However, it cannot be depended on to replace human intelligence and can serve only as an enabling technology.”

Data mining powered by AI algorithms is proving to be a great tool for exploring new avenues to automatically examine, visualize, and uncover patterns in data that facilitate the decision-making process. It simplifies the task of inferring information and patterns from data that might run into hundreds of pages.

Apart from enhancing current offerings, AI vendors could try to develop a standardized approach to market their products. Additionally, vendors can use novel strategies to promote themselves – be it providing superior products or using innovative marketing methods to attract clients in an intensely competitive market.

AI vendors have also ventured into the customer relationship management (CRM) market to help users recognize client-related opportunities and means to effectively utilize them. A personalized approach toward addressing clientele needs is definitely a smart move when there are numerous callers.

“Better customer management and improved product cross-selling are the objectives that AI-based CRM is moving toward,” notes Vijayakumar.

Source: Technical Insights