AI use cases in four key industries

AI and machine learning should not be an end in itself for organizations; it should be adopted for sound business reasons. And as an omni-use technology, we see that happening in all sorts of industries and use cases – from agriculture to space exploration.

But as it begins to be adopted we see the use cases becoming industry-specific very quickly. One reason for that is that AI is driven by data, and each organizations data is unique; peculiar to them and the industries in which they operate.

So for our new Voice of the Enterprise (VotE) AI and Machine Learning survey and report, we wanted to find out what was really happening in four industries in particular: financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and retail.

We asked respondents in each of those industries what their top use cases were now and what they thought they would be in two years’ time. What we found was extremely interesting and indicative of the trajectory of AI and machine learning in the enterprise.

Financial services companies are typically associated with use cases such as fraud detection, which did indeed come out top with 42% of respondents choosing it as their top AI use case. But over the next two years, more complex use cases such as digital and data security (38%) and compliance (37%) will become more of a focus for AI investments than fraud detection (35%).

In healthcare – the industry that I think has the biggest upside potential of radical transformation using machine learning – as the image above shows, hospitals are really focused on clinicians and how they do their jobs. Sure, the headlines might about cancer treatments, but overall more efforts are focused helping clinicians do their day to day jobs more efficiently.

In manufacturing, the top two use cases, which are maintenance forecasting (36%) and supply and demand forecasting (30%) really speak to the value of the machine learning can bring in terms of making predictions about complex systems.

And retailers understand their focus needs to be on customer engagement but also on complex supply chains benefiting from humans augmenting their work with AI. In the future, we expect more focus in retail to come on areas such as payment processing and data security.

So that’s just a small snapshot of all the data we have in our latest voice of the Enterprise AI machine learning survey. For more on the survey and some of its findings, click here and I made a short video about the same, which you can findhere.