A Look at How AI Is Improving 6 Industries

Artificial intelligence (AI) will impact every industry — there’s no doubt about that. But while some industries will take longer to feel the effects of AI development, others are experiencing an AI enhancement already.

With a variety of use cases, AI is taking lessons and optimizing itself for the future of all industries and humanity.

Healthcare, Medicine, and Patients

This is possibly the field experiencing the biggest AI boom right now, and for good reason: there are many areas to improve with technology and self-improving algorithms.

Medical records, for example, haven’t gotten an upgrade in a long time. Automated digital medical records are an improvement over current electronic health records (EHR). EHR technicians now use AI to track, document, sort, and store medical records digitally. That means the technician can spend less time tracking down important medical history and files from various doctors’ offices. And now, patients can get their own medical data in just a few minutes by logging into a universal medical file sharing platform.

Pairing AI with robotics is a powerful combination; doctors can use AI to help assist robots with heart, thoracic, and colorectal surgery. These surgeries often result in better accuracy, less blood loss and pain, faster recovery, shorter hospital stays, and lowered risk of infection. Data shows that, historically, the longer a patient stays in the hospital, the higher the probability that they’ll land back in the hospital within 6 months to a year.

AI in healthcare is impacting everyone: from surgeons and residents to receptionists to patients and their families.

Smarter Education Technology

Robots are helping overworked teachers spend individual time and attention with students who need the most help. Tutor robots interact with students as a teaching assistant-type of support. Younger kids benefit from stronger reading score, language learning, and varied social interaction. For children with disabilities, these robots can feel especially novel and impactful. Even sick or ill kids could keep up-to-date on schoolwork by remotely attending classes.

For parents, it can be a hassle to schedule time for a parent-teacher meeting. But AI is helping parents and teachers schedule appointments more easily, so that both parties can spend less time coordinating and more time helping the student.

EdTech is getting a facelift from AI, and parents, teachers, and students themselves will all experience its benefits.

Better Marketing Tools

Marketing covers a lot of operational areas of a company, and this breadth can be larger for smaller companies. For example, smaller companies may not have the budget to hire data scientists to extract actionable insights from marketing campaigns. But using machine learning and AI, the marketing world is enriched with tons of multi-variate data that can identify trends in customer likes and dislikes, promotional funnels, and email campaign insights.

Automating these types of analysis can save marketing departments hundreds of thousands of dollars while allowing them to keep optimizing and improving.

Within advertising, AI is helping A/B testing workflows at Google. Google AdWords is already showing a variety of keywords without much effort on the marketer’s part, to help optimize the company’s ad message.

Small Business Success

When small and local businesses thrive, the local economy thrives too. If we only allow those companies who can afford AI to access it, we’ll see larger enterprises step in front of smaller companies in no time. For example, with data analysis, ML and AI are helping to automate data extraction, translation, and loading to increase analysis speeds.

At larger companies like Netflix and Seattle-based Amazon, AI is utilized to recommend new and possibly interesting content to users based on other users who have similar browsing history. In this same vein, smaller businesses like travel companies are using AI to recommend tourist spots to customers based on their travel history, interests, and what similar users enjoy.

Shopping Experiences

E-commerce is hitting its stride, and this industry is poised to keep growing. One major benefit of using AI in retail and e-commerce is to improve the customer experience by providing assistance when they may need it most. Using a chatbot application, e-commerce stores can process their users’ questions using natural language processing. This approach is much more personable than linking the user to a general FAQs page.

For shops, AI is improving revenues by decreasing shopping cart abandonment. Using AI with predictive analytics, e-commerce stores can follow up with the right message. A chatbot could ping the user the next time they visit the site with information on what they previously left in their cart.

AI is also helping track inventory and stock, analyze customer information, and forecast sales and market growth.

More Transparent Public Relations

The PR field isn’t the most popular, and not every enterprise has a PR department to lean on. But for those companies that do have PR employees, AI is helping them in myriad ways. For example, PR professionals are using chatbots too, but to contact consumers on social media and increase their social reach. It’s a win-win situation: brands can answer questions and interact quickly, and customers can feel engaged.

When PR professionals write press releases and brand statements, they can often be out-of-touch with the brand’s customers. With machine learning, predicting users’ needs is easier than ever before. Trends in data and predictive analytics boost a PR firm’s understanding of its user base, which can help improve messaging and delivery of information.

A Creative Future

It’s clear that AI can bring new life into industries whose workflows are rooted in old-fashioned technology. We need not look further than healthcare, marketing, education, public relations, and small businesses.

These use cases are excellent examples for AI applications in other industries. What is your favorite AI application of the six we mentioned?