The Consumerization of Artificial Intelligence
The fate of mobile technologies was secured indefinitely with the consumerization of IT, a movement over the last several years in which users shattered traditional boundaries between work and their personal lives by deploying the same mobile devices in both realms. Mobile’s presence was solidified in both arenas, which in turn benefited from the constant connectivity and accessibility
Today, the consumerization of Artificial Intelligence is producing the same effect in much the same way. AI’s longevity may depend even more on impacting the lives of everyday consumers than it does on improving business processes, a feat largely achievable by embedding itself in mainstream society.
The proliferation of AI in the form of virtual digital assistants, driverless vehicles, healthcare use cases and others is responsible for increasing its visibility more so than its ability to inflate ROIs in the secluded offices of organizations.
The synthesis of its presence in these realms, however, is inevitably amalgamating its visibility with its business value to truly spur adoption rates. And, much like the consumerization of IT, the key for this mainstream adoption is largely based on mobile deployments.
The deluge of digital assistants is possibly the most immediate way in which consumers are regularly encountering AI. Virtual assistants are appearing everywhere from mobile devices to desktop ones, from household appliances such as smart speakers to pizza delivery services. Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana are competing with offerings from Google, Amazon, and lesser known entities; the practice of outsourcing these assistants to third-party platforms is gaining traction too. The most universal commonality between these assistants is their reliance upon Natural Language Processing to understand, with varying degrees of efficacy, the desires of end users.
The vast majority include speech recognition capabilities to augment NLP’s ability to readily perform tasks of varying natures. These virtual ‘robots’ of sorts are becoming burdened with more complicated responsibilities largely due to machine learning and deep learning. The customer service scheduling of relatively mundane chatbots is rapidly becoming surmounted by the penchant for digital assistants to anticipate the needs of users: issuing alerts and reminders of appointments, recognizing when to take alternate traffic routes, and knowing which consumer brand coalesces with a user’s preference.
The healthcare applicability of both deep learning and AI in general is another substantial driver for its consumerization, and one of the ways it can greatly influence daily life. AI functionality (particularly its NLP capabilities requisite for speech recognition) is linked to many applications of virtual reality, some of which are used to provide immersive experiences for cognitive injury victims attempting to regain lost physical functionality.
