A recent KPMG survey found that the adoption of AI technologies has drastically accelerated during the pandemic, with 88 percent of small business executives and 80 percent of large enterprise leaders saying that artificial intelligence has helped their companies.
Furthermore, business leaders across industries have expressed confidence that these revolutionary technologies can help solve some tough challenges.
According to Ashley Wali, VP of Product for Discuss.io, there are some important trends to note. These trends are:
Trend #1: Theme Detection in Unstructured Data without Training a Model
According to Wali, this is “The Achilles heel of many entity recognition engines today is that they require hundreds, if not thousands, of positive and negative examples to train a model, yet the goal of many companies is to employ a model to pull trends, themes, and meta-analysis out of their data that they themselves didn’t yet recognize.”
Wali says there’s a strong opportunity to reduce the time to retrieving insights by using AI to accurately detect themes in NLP data without training a model.
Trend #2: Conversational AI in Healthcare – Both Physical and Mental Health
Here Wali explains: “The pandemic brought on an explosion in telehealth and AI experts have observed that people are more honest with chatbots in these settings than humans.”
Wali says there is an opportunity to leverage the maturity of conversational AI to gather more accurate health information from patients in a telehealth setting and better direct their healthcare.
She notes: “Additionally, there are a lot of mental health apps that currently rely on self-reported data (I didn’t get much sleep last night or I’m feeling 2 on a scale of 5) to provide help. But, there is a new breed of apps that are using actual observed data from smart phones that can indicate real issues – especially paired with telehealth talk therapy. Essentially, these apps give real data to therapists and can trigger AI-driven nudges or responses based on signals from patients’ phone sensors.”
Trend #3: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Efforts
Wali looks at teleconferencing and similar applications, noting: “With video conferencing now cemented into the work processes of most American companies, managers and HR professionals have an opportunity to gather hard data to back up anti-bias, diversity, and inclusion initiatives. Virtual meetings offer the opportunity to provide hard data on talk time in meetings, interruptions, and sentiment, sometimes in real time, all through AI technology. With real examples, managers and HR can better coach and support employees on topics like unconscious bias and fostering a culture of inclusion.”
