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Written by: Mike Quindazzi | PwC
Artificial Intelligence is beginning to have transformative effects on consumers, enterprises, and governments around the world. The impacts are contributing by automating repetitive task, creating efficiencies, ubiquitously improving user experience, and creating ways for humans to improve our cognition.
Furthermore, by 2020, the AI market is projected to reach $70 billion, driven by increasing computational power and improving approaches/applications with machine, deep learning, natural language processing and robotics and many a number of other technologies.
The gain a better understanding of the perception of AI in the US, PwC surveyed 2,500 consumers and business decision makers. The objective is to better understand their attitudes towards artificial intelligence, and the future implications on business and society. I found the findings to be insightful and a few that are surprising!
While the world has concerns and there are certainly obstacles to overcome, consumers in the survey believe that AI has the potential to assist in medical breakthroughs, democratize costly services, elevate poor customer service, and even free up an overburdened workforce.
From a business perspective, enterprise executives are most optimistic about the potential of AI technologies to increase efficiencies via automated communications and alerts to enable more proactive approaches (70%) business challenges.
Today’s proactive solutions will mature to include predictive capabilities thanks to a direct correlation with improving big data and data analytics (59%), fueling this advancement. Additionally, our surveyed execs believe virtual personal assistants and automated data analysts are the AI solutions they see most impacting their businesses.
The more tech-savvy executives see a world where AI will further aid human abilities that are amplified as machines help mankind process, analyze, and evaluate the abundance of data that creates today’s world, allowing humans to spend more time engaged in high-level thinking, creativity, and decision-making.
In their own roles, business execs see huge potential for AI to alleviate repetitive, menial tasks such as paperwork (82%), scheduling (79%), and timesheets (78%). In fact, 78% agree it will free all employees from such tasks at all levels across their organizations.
Already, 34% of business execs say that the extra time freed up from using digital assistants allows them to focus on deep thinking and creating.
While 69% of business execs believe an artificial intelligence adviser would be as fair, or even more-fair, than a human manager when it comes to promotions and raises, only 46% would consider having AI involved in decisions regarding their own personal promotions.
Business execs also see potential for AI managers to improve life for employees. The majority believe employees wouldn’t mind working with an AI manager if it meant more flexibility and freedom to work from home (71%) and if it meant a more balanced workload (64%).
67% of business execs believe leveraging AI will help humans and machines work together and combine both digital and human intelligences in the best ways possible and even augment the c-suite and board.