You probably already know artificial intelligence is great at writing web copy, analyzing your company’s sales performance, and creating disturbing stock images.
If you need a landing page, a lead score, or a woman with six or more fingers, AI is your man. However, if you’ve got a fairly standard desk job, you might be less aware of AI’s relevance in other industries.
Here are some of the sectors where AI is making the most headway and what exactly it’s capable of.
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1. Automotive
The most obvious and visible example of AI in the automotive industry is in the evolution of autonomous vehicles.
AI-powered computer vision and deep learning models are to thank for the features that tell self-driving cars what’s on the road ahead of them.
AI can “see” obstacles, like other cars, pedestrians, and cones in the road and alert drivers or automatically avoid them.
AI is also responsible for predictive maintenance, letting drivers know when to service these vehicles.
AI is also used on the sales and customer experience side, helping potential buyers make better decisions about which vehicles they choose.
Specialized automotive sales software lets customers explore virtual showrooms and 3D models, and converse with AI-powered sales agents.
AI can also analyze customer data from various touchpoints (agent interactions, website behavior, etc.) to personalize recommendations, improve customer service, and more.
2. Healthcare
If you’ve had any kind of diagnostic exam recently, like a cancer screening or CT scan, you may have noticed your results mentioned AI.
That’s because AI tools are now being used for pattern recognition and anomaly detection, to help detect abnormal results.
The use of AI is especially common in breast cancer screenings, where it can detect tissue that might become cancerous in the future. Results may already be as accurate as those given by a trained radiologist.
AI is also being used in the creation of new medications — more and more drugs submitted for FDA-approval have been developed using AI.
For example, AI can be used to analyze the chemical and biological properties of diseases, and determine which specific novel proteins and genes to target in fighting them.
Then, it can design new molecules or compounds that are optimized to fight these structures. Finally, AI can be used to test these new drugs for safety.
3. Education
Even if you don’t work in an educational setting, you still might have some experience with adaptive learning.
This application of AI can be used in both academic and workplace settings to flexibility adjust the pace and structure of a course.
Based on students’ needs, adaptive learning models can adjust difficulty, add accessibility features, or tailor materials to different learning styles.
Use-cases exist across online courses, workplace trainings, educational apps, and more.
AI is also being used to make higher education more accessible to people with disabilities. For example, universities with large populations of deaf or hard-of-hearing students may use text-to-speech AI to provide captions during classes.
Unfortunately, this technology is gradually replacing real-time captionists, though it arguably isn’t equipped to do so.
Human captionists are highly-trained professionals who study specialized terms, identify sounds in the room, and more.
4. Agriculture
In Agriculture, AI is used to monitor and optimize crop health, irrigation, fertilization, pest detection, and more.
It can use sensors to detect and analyze large amounts of data about soil health, weather events, irrigation, and more.
Then, it can either make recommendations or trigger actions like automated watering, or changes to temperature and lighting in greenhouses.
Some startups are even exploring the use of AI-powered drones to autonomously spray pesticides.
Just as they do for plants (and humans), AI technologies can monitor the health of livestock animals.
Sensors and wearable devices — think FitBits for cows — can collect data about animals’ habits and health metrics (blood pressure, heart rate, etc).
These sensors can collect data about cows’ milk production levels, or about whether a chicken is pecking or preening more often. AI can then analyze the data to determine illness or parasites might be the cause.
5. Manufacturing
In manufacturing, AI studies and analyzes machinery just as it does biology: it looks for signs of wear, tear, breakage, and other anomalies.
Referred to, in this case, as predictive maintenance, AI looks for early signs that manufacturing equipment might fail before it actually does.
In doing so, AI can reduce unnecessary downtime and capture revenue that might otherwise be lost. It can reduce costs, since maintaining equipment is often much more affordable than repairing it.
AI is also used across the manufacturing sector to optimize production, assembly, and packaging, as well as inspect for quality.
It can detect and improve upon inefficiencies in manufacturing processes, or spot product defects in real-time, and fix or remove them from the line.
Where production is too complex or specialized for purely AI manufacturing, AI can act as a robot partner or assistant, simplifying human workers’ jobs.
A Tiny Taste of the Future
The above examples are meant to give you just a small sampling of the many possibilities for artificial intelligence across all sectors of the economy.
There are many, many more AI tools already in use and being developed for future adoption.
As these technologies evolve, it should become a bit clearer which problems AI is best-suited to solve. In the meantime, human oversight is never a bad idea.
