Rishi Maharaj

Growing up, I've always been fascinated by science-fiction films. From Blade Runner to The Terminator, these movies hauntingly illustrated futuristic worlds shaped by technological innovations that gave rise to advanced machine learning techniques and depicted astonishing examples of artificial intelligence (AI).

But instead of doomsday scenarios with humanity cowering at the feet of our robot overlords, AI has emerged as one of the most significant forces behind the digital transformation of business. In fact, many believe AI has the potential to not only impact the corporate world but lead to ground-breaking applications which will have profound effects on every aspect of our daily lives.

Despite the incredible promise of AI, super smart folks like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk still warn of the coming AI apocalypse. In fact, Elon Musk's new company, Neuralink, aims to stop a Terminator-style attack by fusing man and AI through brain links.

So, what exactly is AI? how can it impact how we conduct business and deliver services in time to come as well as what are the areas that we ought to be most concerned about?

The concept of what defines AI has changed over time, but at the core there has always been the idea of building machines which are capable of thinking like humans.

Machine learning is one of the most common types of artificial intelligence in development for business purposes today. Machine learning is primarily used to process large amounts of data quickly. These types of artificial intelligence are algorithms that appear to "learn" over time, getting better at what they do the more often they do it. Feed a machine learning algorithm more data and its modelling should improve. Machine learning is useful for putting vast troves of data - increasingly captured by connected devices and the internet of things - into a digestible context for humans.

Every industry has a high demand for AI capabilities - especially question answering systems that can be used for legal assistance, patent searches, risk notification and medical research. Other uses of AI include:

Health Care: AI applications can provide personalised medicine and x-ray readings. Personal health care assistants can act as life coaches, reminding you to take your pills, exercise or eat healthier.

Retail: AI provides virtual shopping capabilities that offer personalised recommendations and discuss purchase options with the consumer. Stock management and site layout technologies will also be improved with AI.

Manufacturing: AI can analyse factory IoT data as it streams from connected equipment to forecast expected load and demand using recurrent networks, a specific type of deep learning network used with sequence data.

Banking: Artificial Intelligence enhances the speed, precision and effectiveness of human efforts. In financial institutions, AI techniques can be used to identify which transactions are likely to be fraudulent, adopt fast and accurate credit scoring, as well as automate manually intense