4 Industries That You Would Not Expect AI to Be Rapidly Transforming

Over the past few years, nothing has reshaped and disrupted industries in the same magnitude as artificial intelligence (AI) and its increasing applications.

AI development has now become a space race for global superpowers like China and the US as well as technological hubs like Israel. India has also made a bid to become an industry leader by leveraging AI for national goals and economic growth. This includes a plan to set up a National Centre for Artificial Intelligence and a national AI portal, which was announced in the Interim Budget.

Private investments in AI technologies are also reaching record levels and have increased across sectors and industries in India, with one huge AI development backing coming from Google. A report from LiveMint highlights Google’s plan to set up an AI research lab in Bengaluru. The lab is being primed to tackle big problems like education and healthcare.

While most media buzz comes from AI applications in areas like digital marketing and healthcare, there are also industries that are being rapidly transformed through this emerging technology. Here are four of them:

Agriculture

Perhaps the most impactful application of AI in the country is food and agriculture. As India remains primarily an agrarian economy, AI integration with AgriTech has far-reaching consequences. These applications include weather modelling and forecasting, disease detection, and soil health monitoring among others. Mohali-based AgriTech startup Agnext, for example, provides solutions to farmers by leveraging AI to help them get the optimal output in terms of quality, productivity and profit. It’s now one of the most valued AI startups in the country.

Fraud detection

Of course, AI in digital marketing is nothing new, especially in social media. But the epidemic of political “deep fakes”, “fake news”, and counterfeit products plague Indian social media. With millions of people using these platforms, regulators and startups are now turning to AI to curb this. San Jose and Pune-based AI startup NeuroTags provides anti-counterfeit technology with track and trace capabilities. Another NLP startup identifies deep fakes, including voice manipulation, through metadata analysis.

Legal Industry

Deep learning technologies are changing one of the most inert sectors in the country—the legal system. While AI applications are relatively new, Supreme Court judge Justice A K Sikri believes that AI in the field of law can amplify lawyers capabilities and increase efficiency. AI enabled Legal Tech enables lawyers and paralegals across the globe to automate tasks such as eDiscovery and compliance. Special Counsel detail how AI is currently used by law firms to very quickly sort through documents and records. With more cases relying on digital evidence acquired from computers (eDiscovery), AI is ensuring that the legal industry doesn’t get left behind as technology evolves. By leveraging natural language processing, it can thoroughly sift through computers and files in a very small fraction of the time people can.

Health and Wellness

While AI in healthcare and medical applications are always headline news, the technology is also transforming personal health and nutrition. AI-enabled food delivery and activity aggregator apps may have shaped last year’s innovations, but this year personalisation leads the way. For example, tech startup Calvry developed a Food AI API equipped with an AI-based optical character recognition to help improve the user’s diet. This means a person can scan food items on any menu and identify nutritional value before ordering.

As we predicted, AI played a huge role in shaping 2019. With the year now ended it will continue to define 2020 even more. Especially in the above industries.