From manufacturing to marketing, businesses across multiple industries are leveraging artificial intelligence to optimize their processes and services. As AI technology continues to advance, some sectors will be radically transformed in the years to come.
The experts of Forbes Technology Council are always looking ahead to the latest trends in cutting-edge technology. Below, 16 of them share the industries they believe have the most to gain from implementing AI as well as how the technology will be specifically applied in 2022 and beyond.
Members of Forbes Technology Council discuss the industries and functions that will significantly benefit from AI in 2022 and beyond.
Photos courtesy of the individual members.
1. Manufacturing
The manufacturing industry will benefit significantly from AI due to increased data accessibility. With more data, businesses can apply artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to reduce task time, increase accuracy, handle administrative tasks and so on. As digitization is accelerating, we expect wild experimentation across industries, which will hopefully trickle down to stick with consumers. – Tamas Kadar, SEON
2. Autonomous Vehicle Navigation
Autonomous driving is an area in which AI has been performing significantly well. AI’s capabilities in recognizing driver patterns, predicting accidents and accounting for road variables are outstanding and are continuing to save lives. I am very excited about artificial intelligence’s future in accident prevention and the autonomous driving verticals. – Ty Ward, Credence Solutions Group, LLC.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
3. Education
AI has the potential to benefit education by enabling holistic analysis and instructional optimization so each individual can achieve their full potential, rather than simply optimizing performance against a standard. With limited resources (educators, time and money), we must reimagine how AI can advance a population while fulfilling individual needs and interests by intelligently adjusting to the individual. – Chitra Sivanandam, Reinventing Geospatial, Inc. (RGi)
4. Medical Testing And Diagnosis
I believe the medical field will see significant benefits from AI. There are value-added tasks that can be commoditized, such as reading an X-ray and running laboratory tests, and conclusions can be drawn. AI can drive such tasks to completion. Adding AI to this flow can free up medical professionals to spend time with patients and focus on exceptions rather than the norm. – Bhushan Parikh, ZIMMER BIOMET HOLDINGS, INC.
5. Healthcare Delivery
AI can already analyze X-rays, NMR images and so on quickly and accurately. Improved costs and quality will be ensured as this tech is coupled with wearable monitoring and specialized testing to deliver real-time treatment. The best medical team can’t rapidly correlate vitals, the interaction of medications and so on to administer the right diagnosis and prescription with a sub-second response time. Intelligent systems can. – Wai Wong, Serviceaide, Inc
6. Carbon Emission Reduction
Carbon offset markets are rapidly growing year over year, with exponential growth projected over the next decade as more companies turn to this marketplace to meet their net-zero commitments. The primary limiting factor of this market is the cost and feasibility of emission reduction verification. AI is changing the equation with the potential for rapid, low-cost measurement and verification pathways. – Suzanne Russo, Pecan Street Inc.
7. Agriculture
We often take for granted how something as simple as flour makes its way into grocery stores, but agriculture is one of the most sophisticated industries to get right. AI can help predict supply chain behavior and customer demand down to a regional level while determining which raw products are required to produce a certain yield. AI can also help identify macro weather patterns that can impact harvests. – John Bruno, PROS
8. Customer Service
We are already seeing significant use of AI in a number of industries, including manufacturing, banking and financial services, the insurance industry, media and entertainment, and retail. AI-powered technology solutions not only help organizations deliver highly personalized, real-time customer service, but they also help make employee experiences more enjoyable, efficient and effective. – Shelly Kramer, Futurum Research
9. Customer Experience And Call Centers
Customer experience teams and contact centers are going to benefit from AI. We are already finding ways to assist contact centers (both voice and chat) with solving customer issues faster. Helping customers and agents find information quickly and assisting them in solving issues will result in a smoother experience and higher customer satisfaction. – Varun Singh, Daily
10. Cybersecurity
AI will have a big impact on cybersecurity. Given the dynamic nature of the landscape—billions of targets, millions of attackers and an infinite number of attacker motivations—stopping threats requires constant situational awareness that only a defined and curated machine learning model can provide. Unfortunately, AI is also the technology of choice for attackers, which means we will likely have an “arms race.” – Mark Alba, Anomali
11. Combating Retail Fraud
Recent research by my company found that U.S. card-not-present fraud was up 33%, while in-store fraud declined by 82%. It’s easy for fraudsters to buy stolen information and take advantage of e-commerce transactions. To combat this, the retail industry will rely more heavily on machine learning and AI to speed response time and update fraud models automatically to reflect new behaviors based on analysis of new data. – Carleigh Jaques, Visa
12. Hospitality
After the initial shock of Covid, hotels and restaurants had trouble retaining staff. Using hotels as an example, AI can tie together a traveler’s full profile to enhance personalization at check-in and provide vital information about arrivals, travel delays and more. Covid has accelerated the need to automate tasks, and current ML tech is a way for companies to greatly improve customer experience. – Jeff Catlin, Lexalytics, an InMoment company
13. Product Personalization
Companies that crack the code on using machine learning to drive outcomes will have an advantage. As an example, some companies have applied ML to personalize product experience based on what they know about the user or a set of similar users. This has the benefit of delighting the end user, which can translate into both retention and increased usage. – Dave Merkel, Expel
14. Managing The Gig Economy
AI can help the gig economy in a variety of ways. It can break down large work streams into smaller chunks and integrate the results back into the work stream. It can optimize work assignments across a much larger set of workers. It can mediate between human work and computer work. And most importantly, via a global gig economy, AI can shift work production from mature markets to emerging markets. – Andy Tian, Asia Innovations Group
15. Software Development
The world of software development will definitely see a big disruption from AI, with new libraries and tools that will enable the generation of code using natural language. In addition, anything that can be automated will become automated, and with insights from AI-based tools, this will open up new areas of innovation both in how we build software and in how we support and grow businesses with that software. – Manoj Agarwal, DevRev
16. Content Creation
The adoption of AI is elevating business and consumer value across many industries. The usage of AI in content creation for the entertainment industry offers a low-risk and high-reward environment. Behavioral data from across channels will be used to create content—including scripts, scenes, actor personas, music and songs—that’s targeted at consumer psychology to engage and wow different customer segments. – Nikhil Pachhandara, OPTOFIDELITY