One can expect to see more, not less of AI in the coming year. More jobs would be created rather than snatched away by AI; at least this is what tech giants are believing.
Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos in a statement on the future of AI said, “I predict that, because of artificial intelligence and its ability to automate certain tasks that in the past were impossible to automate, not only will we have a much wealthier civilization, but the quality of work will go up very significantly and a higher fraction of people will have callings and careers relative to today.”

How will AI develop in 2019?

Tech biggies like Alibaba, Google, and Microsoft, have come up with ambitious plans to ‘democratize‘ AI.
Google seems to be spearheading this revolution through its offering, Tensorflow. Tensorflow is helping small businesses and developers innovate through its open-source machine learning framework.
Another AI project by Google, Jigsaw leverages artificial intelligence to detect toxic comments and hate speech which has proven to be quite successful. This tool assigns a toxicity score to a piece of text based on numerous parameters.
In a bid to expand their horizons, Google is targeting emerging economies like India to expand its offerings. Indian policymakers and government officials are being trained in AI tools to streamline governance. NITI Aayog, a policy think-tank of the government of India, is partnering with Google to work on an array of initiatives to help build an Artificial Intelligence (AI) ecosystem across the country.
Amitabh Kant, Chief Executive Officer of NITI Aayog, said in a statement: “NITI’s partnership with Google will unlock massive training initiatives, support start-ups and encourage AI research through PhD scholarships, all of which contribute to the larger idea of a technologically-empowered New India,”
Through their collaboration, the organizations are planning to conduct hands-on training programmes to sensitize and educate lawmakers and technical experts in government about relevant AI tools and how they can be used to streamline governance.

On the same lines, Chinese tech behemoth Alibaba aims to bring sweeping and disruptive changes to China’s vibrant business landscape.
The machine intelligence technology division leads Alibaba’s efforts into AI. The division is working in areas including computer vision, speech recognition, optimization, and natural language processing.
One of the projects underway comes in the form of AliMe, an AI-enabled chatbot Alibaba developed that recognizes what people say both in terms of the text and the speech.
Not limiting the use cases of AI to just e-commerce and retail, Alibaba has ventured AI in farming and agriculture. On this front, the company is coming up with initiatives that can carry out a variety of things including, tracking animal IDs, detecting nutrition management, etc.
“Alibaba has changed the everyday life of the Chinese in China. Looking forward, our visionary leader, Jack Ma, wants us to be able to reach two billion consumers and to help 10 million businesses around the world. That’s a huge call, but we already have half of the platforms in place.” said Alibaba’s chief scientist Xiaofeng Ren, in a statement to CeBIT.
Meanwhile, Microsoft too is getting on the AI bandwagon. It’s CEO Satya Nadella in a bid to demonstrate that Microsoft can develop state-of-art services and still be a trusted provider for preserving user’s data has come up with a plan to expand the offerings of its digital assistant Cortana. Microsoft is targeting the office space to introduce a workplace-specific service to integrate AI into more of its enterprise services.

What will become increasingly important?

At the helm of all these AI developments that planned is, ‘Data.’ According to an industry insider, the benefits of AI can only be reaped if the data being used is fit for purpose.
Major AI companies are leading in this domain solely because of the fact that they have a lot of data for the algorithm to be trained on. For these techniques, to prove fruitful, it is extremely critical to have smart and relevant data. The performance of algorithms is more dependent on quantity rather than the quality of the data. Unless you can feed all the knowledge manually, it is vital to have an abundance of data for the algorithm to be trained on.
Artificial Intelligence rests upon the idea of mimicking how humans learn. All of our life experiences act as a set of data for us to learn. Thus a successful AI needs to mirror human behaviour to get successful.
Let us change the frame of reference and drill down to some of the significant developments that AI is definitely going to witness in 2019.

1. More jobs will be created by AI than lost to it

A utopian workless future will still be a distant fantasy in the coming year. It is still far from reality that the rise of machines will take over our jobs and cause a social strife all over the world.According to a Gartner report, as many as 1.8 million jobs would be lost to automation, especially in manufacturing, but also, 2.3 million would be up for grabs!
Let us consider a scenario to understand the situation better – Consider a garment factory, imagine a machine operator in a factory. Although a portion of his/her job could get automated, they will definitely have other roles, for instance, managing inventory and overseeing junior workers, which computers cannot supervise. Also consider the difference between a worker in a US garment factory and its counterpart in Vietnam: the American unit is more likely to be technologically forward, and a typical worker’s day will likely include a higher number of non-routine tasks that can’t be automated.
Undoubtedly, it is fairly accurate to say that non-manual jobs will be lost to AI, but more and more will be created as well! Repetitive tasks wouldn’t need to be performed by humans, and we will get more time to utilize our creative thinking and exemplary abilities to perform tangible tasks.
Industries such as education, IT services, public sector, especially healthcare will see a drastic infusion of new job opportunities pertaining to AI.
Although when it comes to doctors and lawyer, AI service providers have made a concerted effort to present their technology as something which can work alongside human professionals, assisting them with repetitive tasks while leaving the “final call” to them.

2. AI assistants will become a fixture in enterprises

AI is so intertwined in our everyday lives that we don’t even realize it, from a simple Google search to shopping at Amazon, or watching Netflix – AI is at work to provide us with the best-personalized experience.
With significant product releases from the likes of Apple, Samsung, Google, Amazon, and several other vendors – It is evident that people are embracing the comfortable and conversational modes of interaction.
2018 was the year of consumer voice assistant, 2019 will be the year where enterprises will see an influx of voice assistants in their day-to-day operations. Already, enterprises have begun realizing the importance of conversational technologies and are leveraging them as an extension of their businesses to support a wide range of tasks.
NLP (Natural Language Processing) and Machine Learning AI assistants will become increasingly efficient, thanks to their exposure to more and more information about how we communicate. By the end of 2019, these assistants will become so sophisticated that they would be able to anticipate our behavior, read our facial expressions, and even understand our habits.

3. AI will venture beyond tech companies

Many AI luminaries believe that AI has a much broader scope outside the tech domain. Citing use cases from a recent McKinsey report which found that AI will generate revenue of more than $ 10 trillion in GDP by 2030.
According to Andrew Ng, co-founder of Google Brain, “I think a lot of the stories to be told next year (2019) would be in AI applications outside of the software industry. As an industry, we’ve done a quite decent job of helping companies like Google and Baidu, but also Facebook and Microsoft — which I have nothing to do with — but even companies like Square and Airbnb, Pinterest, are starting to use some AI capabilities. I think the next massive wave of value creation will be when you can get a manufacturing company or agriculture devices company or a health care company to develop dozens of AI solutions to help their businesses.”
Many companies are recognizing the importance of catching up to AI technology, lest they be left behind. Here are 11 industries that are experiencing disruption.
     • Agriculture
     • Retail
     • Manufacturing
     • Law
     • Automotive
Although the domain that would reap the maximum benefits will definitely be healthcare. The following could be significant developments in healthcare:
     • Managing Medical Records and Other Data
     • Doing Repetitive Jobs
     • Virtual Nurses
     • Precision Medicine
     • Health Monitoring
     • Healthcare System Analysis
     • Drug Creation

4. SMEs will see a significant transformation in 2019

The small and medium-sized businesses are bound to see a major overhaul in 2019. This is precisely due to the recent commitments by tech giants – Organizations like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. are offering open-source frameworks that could easily be integrated with the current business processes.
In 2019, SMEs would no longer need to break the bank to incorporate AI into their operations. By leveraging existing platforms like Tensorflow (By Google), Keras, SparkMLlib, Caffe, etc., SMEs could save considerable cost and time which would have otherwise been required in developing and designing the products in-house.
Apart from this 2019 would also witness an influx of new AI-powered analytics tools. These tools are beneficial for businesses who don’t want to invest heavily in Artificial Intelligence and are still looking to reap the benefits of it. Analytics tools offer a gateway for small businesses to leverage the potential of AI even if they do not possess a vast amount of data.

Must Read: How Can AI Benefit Small Businesses

5. AI skills will become increasingly in demand

Organizations have been facing an impertinent issue of lack of technical skills required for developing to-the-mark AI products.

AI-related skills, as well as in related areas such as machine learning are in short supply today. Due to the relative newness of this technology, most educational institutions haven’t yet introduced a dedicated curriculum in their syllabus for AI and deep learning. This has created a crevice of sorts in the demand and supply of skilled AI professionals who are good with these skills.

As the democratization of AI is on the lines – It has to become viable for both, the tech giants and small and medium-sized businesses to recruit AI professionals easily.
Moreover, AI professionals require extensive on-the-job training, and as of now, there aren’t enough experienced AI professionals to take over leadership roles required by organizations who are just beginning to introduce AI in their services.
2019 would see tech giants such as Amazon and Google invest globally in expanding their talent pool. The Google Brain facility in Toronto is exclusively dedicated to research in AI; also Amazon has established an AI-focused lab in England and plans to build a similar facility in Spain.

Wrapping Up

The application and use case of Artificial Intelligence is beginning to encompass more and more businesses and is becoming a critical aspect of our everyday lives. As this article suggests, the use of machine learning is not just limited to the more conventional industries. Its use goes far beyond what one can imagine – Even bloggers nowadays are utilizing machine learning algorithms to engage users and improve their conversion rates.
Many companies already see the competitive edge AI-powered solutions can give and we can easily anticipate now more than ever the unusual uses of artificial intelligence in the future.
But the elephant in the room certainly needs to be addressed – The advancement and the evolution of AI comes with abundant risks. Due to its relative infancy, no proper regulations have been put in place to ensure that this gold mine doesn’t get exploited by notorious elements.

We urgently need to account for ethics and issues of bias during the development of these AI-based products, whereas today organizations easily overlook these things.

Considering how gruesome it is in finding the perfect tech partners for developing an efficient AI product. EngineerBabu houses a talented bunch of AI professionals who have proven their mettle by creating hundreds of successful AI products based on Machine Learning and Deep Learning technologies.

Contact Us for a free consultation call, we would love to guide you. In the meanwhile, check out some of our amazing AI products, right here.

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• Digital Transformation in Finance

The post Artificial Intelligence in 2020 | AI Development appeared first on EngineerBabu Blog.

Many find them similar but Digitization is the process of storing, converting, processing or transferring information in a format recognized by computers.
Whereas, Digitalization is the change in social, business and economic behavior on the adoption of new technology.
The essence of digitalization is the way consumers, businesses and the government adopt & incorporate technology to collaborate with systems, processes, people and the entire business community.

One of the best examples of digitalization is the Apple watch.

The Apple Watch is a perfect specimen to understand digitalization, it shows how a normal watch can be transformed into a watch with a phone, messaging and internet capabilities.
Another good example is the mobile numbers linked with Aadhar Card (Unique Identification Number for residents of India) which in turn is coupled with the financial account of consumers.
However, it is not only technology but the changing corporate scenario, business processes, and operating culture, that drives digital transformation to success.

The financial projects eyeing digital transformation are long-term, massive in scope and comes with risks too. Though many consider digital transformation a hype or the confusion, it does involve a sincere & serious change in business spectrum. Since the time digital transformation entered the finance domain, there have been many surveys and research to understand the importance or impact of the same. Digital transformation technology calls for an investment in hardware, software and sometimes even in products or services.
Gartner survey with financial executives from huge corporate establishments revealed that 62% feel digital transformation is a management initiative while remaining consider it as a part of optimization. Also, many companies are keen on investing in technology that can speed-up their businesses. In fact, companies opt for investing in digital transformation to differentiate from their competitors.

Impact of Digital Transformation on Finance

Digital disruption has heavily impacted a variety of habits and behaviors of the professional world. Technology combined with smartphones and the internet provides numerous benefits to the customers as well as to financial establishments. Previously the implications of digital transformation were unknown as people were concerned about the transition from manual to the digital world. However, the scenario has changed now. With tighter regulations and changing customer demands, the financial applications and systems have become nimbler and progressive.

For financial establishments, digitalization is more than just adopting technologies such as cloud, big data, social media or mobile. It is aimed more towards creating new business models to develop an eco-system where all markets & consumers could participate.
Thus, organizations focus more on capitalizing with new and emerging technologies that help them in positioning and transforming the teams into high performers.
Digital transformation enables digital tools to enhance productivity & efficiency and change of hard paper documents to secured PDF or HTML formats. The days with an application form and product sheets are gone. The sales team & field officers are now empowered with smartphones and other portable devices where information can easily be displayed. Many financial services providers have embraced digital transformation. However, many companies have taken hold up approach of observing the developments and then decide on investing in digitization.
Digital transformation comes with its share of risks, and hence a setback approach is a safer route.
Digitalization has positively impacted the economic growth and has accelerated the growth of innovations. Many are on for a debate that there is no economic growth, but the signs of potential positive impact are quite visible; the best examples are the mobile banking apps, mobile money, and e-wallets.

Enlisted here is the importance of digital transformation on financial sector:
1. High Standardization: Finance functions are always considered as high performing. When these are integrated with technology systems with standardized processes and data; leads to a high standardization.

2. Highly Automated functions: Adoption of new technology tools lead to higher process automation for services such as money remittance, procurement orders, invoice generation, and KYC verification.

3. Faster Performance: With the adoption of big-data and other machine learning tools in finance, it is easier to predict and forecast budget allowing teams to finish month-end cycles before time.

4. Insight-driven functions: Digitalization has modified financial models in such a way that the resources concentrate more on deriving insights rather than focusing only on transactions.
5. Improved customer and employee experience: The same level of information is available with customers and employees and thus less chaos in transactions.6. Better Service Delivery: The legacy systems integrated with new technologies have changed the finance’s operating model. The structured processes have improved service delivery.
Along with the high importance, the major priorities & challenges for financial services and banking establishments over the world that would impact their business includes strategies listed below:

1. Acting in line with the regulatory requirements
2. Reduced costs or improved margins for retail business operations
3. Improved customer segmentation
4. Enhancements in services, product designs, and promotional channels
5. Migration from physical or legacy channels to a digital platform
6. Integrating the legacy systems with new technology following all compliance and guidelines

Financial organizations now implement these strategies and they can digitally transform and automate their processes. The impact is such that there has been a drastic improvement in performing customer operations in a lesser time-frame. The automation has lead financial companies to meet regulatory deadlines, achieve operational and transactional risks and still stay competitive by investing in technology.
Digital transformation has assisted in automating monotonous tasks, management of compliance and accounting & operations functions which include accounts, reports & analysis. Digitalization also reduces the possibility of cyber risks and minimize errors that occur due to the execution of robust strategies.

Critics response to Digital Transformation

Despite the positive impact of digital transformation, critics believe this is a wonderful opportunity for tech vendors to restyle their services & products and sell them in the name of digital transformation.
Well, another critical point to note here is that none of the tech guys spend their working hours digitally transforming or innovating, but instead spend time in programming, coding, and development. However, critics do not realize that this coding, programming, and development is what makes a system perform in a particular manner. The technology drives these systems and hence the transformation.

Why digital transformation matters in finance?

Digital transformation may only seem to be a buzzword, but as they say, there is more to an iceberg than appears on the surface, there is definitely more to our story of digital transformation as well.
The concept of digitalization assists financial service executives in altering the already set rules, and the economic growth is quite visible. The customer-facing mobile apps are the best examples. The increasing number of people relying on the mobile and online banking applications, the financial and banking services are on a race towards digital transformation. The more convenient an application is for customers, the more is the digital transaction and financial growth.
For banks and credit card companies, providing a mobile customer experience with no downtime and faster transaction process is of higher importance. The other financial establishments such as capital markets, funds, and equity market utilize big data and automation tools for data analysis and high-performance computing to track milliseconds of transaction data.

A closer look at both the examples reveals that the business is capitalizing on technology to improve customer experience.
The primary aim of digital transformation in the financial sector is to be more customer-centric.
In financial services, competition is not just with other financial services providers but with anyone offering a real technology and consumer experience. The focus while digitizing financial services or while developing financial mobile applications should be to make the customer’s lives easier. Here, it is essential to make a point that digital transformation is not a technology strategy but a business strategy that makes business swift and quick to respond to the market.
Digitalization has unlocked newer opportunities in the banking, credit and capital market functions of the financial domain. There are multiple branch locations, and it is hard to keep a branch right next to the consumer; hence mobile apps that keep your office straight in your hands. Having said this, many financial institutions still rely on their legacy systems that run on IBM frames and are built on COBOL.
These systems, however, cannot be upgraded or updated as the developers too have moved to the newer technologies. It is a considerable challenge for some financial services companies to pull out the data and get on to the modern technology-based system. Other than the integration of the legacy system with advanced technology, the keenness to embrace digitalization by company workforce was also a challenge. But with the disruption in existing services and products, it is essential for companies to focus on acquiring new skills and technology.
The key to surviving in a digital environment is to adapt and adjust to the changes. CIOs take this responsibility to adopt the changes and lead the transformation. Though the right technology will outgrowth the efficiency, it is the workforce that ensures successful implementation.

Digital tools meant to support financial functions

The digital tools meant for financial services industry focus more on improving and updating the existing competencies and core systems. There are other exponential tools too that are intended to deliver new capabilities.
The growing technologies disrupting the financial system includes:
Cloud
The benefit of adopting cloud in finance is unquestionable. Cloud brings further acceleration and swiftness. Cloud technology in financial services expedites new digital workflows enabling effective interdepartmental collaboration or collaboration between business and third parties. The financial institutions use SaaS-Based cloud applications for business processes such as HR and accounting. As the workforce and the team heads get comfortable with the application, it gets integrated with the core systems.Financial services/solutions find security & compliance as crucial problems.

However, with cloud-enabled applications, it is easy to scale data for critical functions such as credit scoring, consumer payments, statements and billings for essential account functions. Also, data speed is vital for financial firms to stay competitive and in effect. Financial services industry is the primary target for cyber criminals, owing to sensitive personal information. The quickness of cloud safeguards the critical data, digital financial assets, and user information while protecting the employee performance.
Robotic Process Automation
One of the hottest entry in the financial services vertical is the robotic process automation. Financial establishments work on multiple technology systems and process robotics assist in automating transaction processing and communication across various systems.

Process robotics address the key challenges of the financial sector and can be effectively utilized for:

• Billing and collections operations & accounts receivable functions
• Journal entry, allocations & adjustments, inter-company transactions
• Reporting-financial as well as external
• Budgeting, Planning & Forecasting
• Treasury processes

Process robotics will enhance the functionalities of legacy systems by lessening inefficiency and addressing the manual intensive activities. Although Process Robotics is at a testing state at a few organizations but is working exceptionally well to support legacy systems.
Data Visualization
When it comes to communicating across multiple departments within the financial organization, data visualization is the key to attain insight. Business executives have an enormous amount of data but communicating in regards to same was an issue.

However, with data visualization, one can easily track and predict organizational performance. The financial sector is considered as the data hub. With data visualization, the analysts can explain complex data, trace intersections of information and present details based on this analysis that helps in forecasting organizational performance.
It is estimated that more than 65% of people are visual learners. Data visualization technique provides decision makers with detailed visual data illustrations so that they can understand the analytics through visuals and make informed decisions.
Data visualization can also help the financial sector in identifying new and additional trends for interactive features and more profound insights. In fact, data visualization is used by the financial leaders to track KPIs- financial and non-financial both. Also, these financial leaders improve team performance by correlating the KPI metrics and data analysis.
Advanced Analytics
Today, there are several different channels through which the customers interact with their financial services provider. Because of the multiple channels, there is a load of customer data being collected by financial organizations. This data can be effectively leveraged using Artificial Intelligence or advanced or predictive analytics to gain insight into consumer behavior. Advance/predictive analytics can assist financial establishments to optimize their processes thereby reducing costs.
Predictive Analytics
Predictive Analysis is best used in applications such as Fraud Detection. The dashboard of predictive analytics reports prompts and provides notification on anomalies in transaction data. Other than detecting the anomalies, the advanced analytics software can assist in collecting, cleaning and analyzing raw data. The analytics also assist in identifying customer trends by predicting marketing efforts and analyzing customer past and present online behavior using machine learning algorithms.
Advanced Analytics improves a variety of finance functions and assists financial leaders in achieving insights such as:

• Improving supply chains
• Revenue Forecasting
• Identifying the trouble spots
• Fraud detection

The combination of human judgment with automation and advanced analytics provides an ethical oversight to the business.
Cognitive Computing
Cognitive computing is yet another constant disruption in finance. It is the technology that makes use of natural language processing, machine learning, speech recognition, and computer vision to stimulate human thinking. For financial organizations, it is essential to collect, analyze and use data to improve decision making. 

Some of the basic elements of cognitive computing are:

• It enables financial organizations to obtain personalized information about the customers and use the same to notify about payments, bills, and other reminders. Cognitive computing also offers suggestions regarding exceeding customer payments and other intelligent automation services.
• The cognitive computing also ensures the creation of conversation interfaces for placing customer queries and responding to them. Chat-bots are the best example of AI-powered digital assistants, developed to respond to customer queries thereby improving consumer services and CRM.
• Robo-advisors too are a part of cognitive computing but are not AI-powered. The Robo-advisors use algorithms to read through data and come up with a suitable suggestion.
• Cognitive technology works similar to human thinking but is considered as key to security. Protection of financial data is vital; hence cognitive computing is the solution.
• With complex laws and regulations within the financial sector, poor knowledge of data policies can make finances a challenge for customers. With cognitive computing, real-time updates on rules and real-time implementation of the policies help in keeping policy documents updated and encourage good compliance.
• Cognitive computing has enabled real-time trading analysis and improved trading systems so that customers can be served faster and better.

Cognitive computing has been beneficial for both the company and customers. Apps enabled with algorithms, machine learning, digital advisors and improvement in cyber security have positively impacted customers to manage their finances.
In-memory Computing
With financial companies dealing an enormous amount of data, higher transaction volumes and increasing compliance; there arises a need to address real-time data analysis challenge. If it is finance, it has to be high performing, but with enormous data load, the efficiency can be at stake.
The massive amount of trading and accounting data calls for a robust infrastructure, with high speed of transactions and in real-time. In-memory computing platform addresses these challenges. The information is stored in the main random access memory of specialized servers. This means that it eliminates the delay while retrieving data from servers.
The 24-hour mobile banking pile up huge data and at the same time the regulations, exchange rates, interest rates, share prices, etc. are also required to be updated. The in-memory computing platform offer users with real-time information and calculation. It also provides information around commodity trading in real-time at an excellent speed for the users to experience a never before financial experience.
BlockchainOne of the most trending digital tool these days is Blockchain. With the advent of Blockchain technology, the financial services industry is considered to have entered into a new digital era. This new technology has changed the way we think about transactions and has revolutionized the economy. Blockchain technology stands out of all the technologies that have disrupted the finance vertical.
Blockchain powers decentralized digital currency also called as cryptocurrency.
Recommended Read: How is BlockChain Revolutionizing Finance  
In Blockchain technology, encrypted blocks of data are considered as currency and are shared during transactions. Blockchain technology makes use of advanced encryption techniques to verify currency and transaction. Blockchain technology ensures that only the authorized users who own the part of Blockchain can edit the data using the private key.
Smart Contract is one of the most attractive applications of Blockchain technology. It automates the execution of commercial agreements and transactions. As Blockchain technology entertain no middlemen, smart contracts are considered more secure than the traditional agreements that adds up cost for the middlemen. It is also believed that the Blockchain technology will assist in fraud reduction, enable one time KYC process, efficient & cost effective trading, and many more.
The technology may sound a promising one, but still many challenges need to be addressed to transform the finance and banking sector with Blockchain technology completely.

Concluding View

It is just a matter of time before we see the described technologies disrupting the financial sector. With consumers becoming smarter and more demanding,

It is essential for commercial establishments to undergo digital transformation to appeal, capture and maintain the attention of consumers.

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