Artificial Intelligence – The Future of Automation!

Artificial Intelligence is growing on a bigger scale now! It’s not just Google’s Deepmind, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft etc., every other major company is working on Artificial intelligence to blend it to our daily life. As of now, there are many path-breaking situations we’ve seen in AI, but what will be the future of AI? Will they help in automation?

It’s not just the Hollywood showcasing Artificial intelligence as a threat to humans, many scientists believe in the same. We, humans, have a tendency to attract to things which make our life better. Well, this is what we believe in so far! For example, prior to the mobile phones & consoles, all we have left is with letters & outdoor games. If you see now, there’re very few people who are not addicted to these! Most of the times, we wanted to make use of the technology to make work simpler & automated. The invention of a washing machine can be considered as one good example. Before to this, we used to wash & dry clothes manually. But now, we are using the washing machine to do this task automatically.

It’s not just washing machine, there are several other devices which are automating several of our tasks instead of we doing them manually. So, what does AI has to do with the automation?

You may not know, but the Artificial Intelligence is already present in many of our daily usage devices thanks to Alan Turning for his idea on self-learning concept, but the current algorithms powering devices don’t fully support self-learning to the greater extent. If there’s one kind in the world who thinks differently from the time being & does the work based on the situation irrespective of whether it’s an easy or hard task are humans. So, it’s very hard to analyze what humans can do if they are kept in that particular situation. Not everyone thinks the same, & the perception differs from person to person, so is the way they do the task. But, we do have data now, with machine learning, predictive analytics & cognitive computing, everything is possible.

With that data, we can make things automated to a greater extent, and here’re few predictions on how AI can help the automation in future.

Future of Automation powered by Artificial Intelligence:

The future is very promising and technology developed by us are always evolving to make our life simple. Using the artificial intelligence here are 5 ways we gonna turn our daily tasks automated –

Virtual Digital Assistants

When we think of automation powered by Artificial intelligence, the first thing that comes to our mind is the virtual digital assistant. Google Assistant [Allo], Siri, Cortana, Facebook M are already there and have become a part of our life, still, they are not that smart enough to do the tasks automatically. But, in future, they are able to do that by self-learning. As we already started making use of these virtual digital assistants, there is a big pile of data getting stored in the respective data centers of the companies.

So, they can re-feed the algorithms to become smart, thus making the not-so-smart virtual digital assistants become smart. One best example is Viv labs Ai. It is smart enough to book movie tickets, transfer money in a matter of seconds and the team behind Viv are responsible for the birth of Siri.

Imagine the work you can do when you have a super intelligent virtual digital assistant taking care of your to-do list, reminding you about tasks, replying back to emails, re-organizing your music playlist based on your mood etc. I believe we have to wait 5 more years to see the smart AI doing all of our tasks.

Journalism

The one thing we really depend on both online and offline is news/ stories which are written by humans. If you see the way we write, it follows a particular pattern or you can say the style which is meant for a particular group of audience. There are only a few writers out there who can write in a way that is liked by the global audience, but it really takes a hell lot of time.

Talking about journalism, either be it’s a tech event, sports event, or movie review [live blogging] or a particular natural disaster happened in an odd time like early morning around 3AM, it will be very hard for a human to write at that particular time, Still, only humans are writing and there are only a few cases where Artificial Intelligence helped in writing such stories. But, in future we only see AI’s covering the breaking stories, live blogging, late night stories etc.

So, how can they do it? Obviously, the AI’s are always connected online, and they know what’s happening around. If you give inputs like what’s the event about and the past data you covered the event [disaster], they can make use of different algorithms to understand the history of the event, and can write about it.

To make you understand, I want to talk about BuzzFeed’s own algorithm for writing viral stories. Whatever story they write are all based on virality. Either the stories are about to be viral or they are already viral, so how do they do it? Again their own algorithms play a major role here. They actually work like Google trends, so whenever a story on the internet is starting to get high engagement, the variables are triggered and are fed to editors to make a story about it. In future, these tasks will be automated as AI will be able to rewrite based on humans interests & emotions. Like, there’s one Japanese AI who has already written a novel and was very near to win a prize for that, and recently Google started feeding the Deepmind’s AI with romantic novels, so the AI’s can learn & understand how human’s write & how it can write with human’s touch.

The automated journalism will become a reality in the future and it will revolutionize the way we read the news/ stories.

Search Engine

When we think of search engine, the first word that pops into your mind is ‘Google’ and there’s no secondary thought in it. Google’s algorithms are always evolving and no one actually knows what’s the secret to rank. But, recently it is reported that Google has 3 main ranking factors – Content, links & Rank Brain. The first 2 factors are known to everyone but, what’s the last one? and how is it related to the automation?

Let me tell you one thing, Google’s search algorithm is so complex, that even insiders cannot really determine in what way the rankings will work. This is due to the Rank Brain, a self-learning algorithm which auto arranges the search results based on different variables [or in this case, the signals] I don’t want to go deep into the SEO, anyhow if you want to know about Rank Brain and its effects on ranking, you can check here. For now, let me tell you how is it related to automation.

Well, you always end up going to 3rd or 4th page to get a perfect answer for your query in Google as mostly the results in the page are spammed by event bloggers, niche bloggers etc. So, in future, the Rank Brain will evolve to a stage that it will completely understand the query and gives the answers either in the form of rich snippets, knowledge graph or in the first page itself you will surely get the perfect answer for your query. This is purely possible by automating the ranking of all sites and arranging the search results based on website engagement, analyzing the content and several other factors. So, in future, you don’t have to go through all the search results just to get the answers, as the algorithm is self-learning so it keeps on re-arranging the results automatically based on user behavior. This ranking factor is so important, that is going to clean the complete spam in the search results, thereby giving the chance for real content to rank well.

Self-driving

This is not a new topic to anyone, & everyone knows self-driving is still evolving. Tesla is a pioneer in self-driving/ autopilot and has been released several other software updates to make the driving safely. Not only Tesla, Uber is also planning to make all their cabs as a driverless by using the self-driving.

So, in future, the algorithms that are responsible for self-driving will evolve to a stage that they are able to completely avoid the accidents. But still, there’s a debate whether to completely rely on auto pilot or not and even Tesla is not advising to take your hands off the steering when in auto-pilot. Well, in future, the things are going to be a little different.

We all played  Grand Theft Auto series and we know how driving cars  works inside the game. Based on this, researchers found that the game can teach a lot to self-driving algorithms on how to drive on real roads. You may think it’s funny, but it’s not and now the self-driving algorithms are playing the GTA series to understand more on navigation. So, in the coming days, we may not need to place our hands-on steering too :p

Marketing & Sales

If there’s one thing that you should be happy for, is the ways the marketing is going to be in future. Just in, we have seen the Augmented reality based apps making a strong connection with the customer base and in future things are going to be extreme. Already there are many remarketing techniques offered by both AdWords & Facebook, but in future marketing is going to reach the next level.

Remember the quote, ” You’ll see what you want to see?” Well, based on this the algorithms will learn from you what you want to see in the ads. The data can be from your past historical search, websites you normally visit, your engagement, interests, wishlists etc. and the ads are targetted in such a way that you won’t think that they are off topic.

Adding fire to the marketing, even in the sales, the self-learning algorithms will learn about the potential leads and organize them in a way that they will surely turn to a positive lead. Already salesforce, Oracle & IBM has their own AI’s battling for the top spot in CRM and the latest AI – Einstein from salesforce blew the people’s mind off. The AI is designed in a way that it will learn about every customer you have in the database, and fine tune the products, services for every single customer, thus by offering more personalized services on the automated basis.

In future, both sales and marketing are completed automated that every request from the customer is received, processed and delivered by the Artificial intelligence bots.

This is what going to be the future of automation powered by Artificial intelligence, and there are many other ways that AI going to make our tasks simpler and these are just 5 among them.