The 7 Best Examples of How Companies Use Artificial Intelligence in Practice
All the world’s tech giants from Alibaba to Amazon are
in a race to become the world’s leaders in artificial intelligence (AI). These
companies are AI trailblazers and embrace AI to provide next-level products and
services. Here are 10 of the best examples of how these companies are using
artificial intelligence in practice.
·
Alibaba
·
Alphabet
– Google
·
Amazon
·
Apple
·
Microsoft
·
Facebook
·
IBM
1. Alibaba
Chinese company Alibaba is the world's largest
e-commerce platform that sells more than Amazon and eBay combined. Artificial intelligence (AI) is
integral in Alibaba’s daily operations and is used to predict what customers
might want to buy. With natural language processing, the company automatically
generates product descriptions for the site.
Another way Alibaba uses artificial intelligence is in
its City Brain project to create smart cities. The project uses AI algorithms
to help reduce traffic jams by monitoring every vehicle in the city.
Additionally, Alibaba, through its cloud computing division called Alibaba
Cloud, is helping farmers monitor crops to improve yield and cuts costs with
artificial intelligence.
2. Alphabet – Google
Alphabet is Google’s parent company. Waymo, the
company’s self-driving technology division began as a project at Google.
Today, Waymo wants to bring self-driving technology to the world not only to
move people around but to reduce the number of crashes. Its autonomous
vehicles are currently shuttling riders around California in self-driving
taxis. Right now, the company can’t charge fare and a human driver still sits
behind the wheel during the pilot program. Google signaled its commitment to
deep learning when it acquired DeepMind.
Not only did the system learn how to play 49 different
Atari games, the AlphaGo program was
the first to beat a professional player at the game of Go. Another AI
innovation from Google is Google Duplex. Using natural language processing, an
AI voice interfaces can make phone calls and schedule appointments on your
behalf. Learn even more about how Google is incorporating artificial
intelligence and machine learning into operations.
3. Amazon
Not only is Amazon in the artificial intelligence game
with its digital voice assistant, Alexa,
but artificial intelligence is also part of many aspects of its business.
Another innovative way Amazon uses artificial intelligence is to ship things to
you before you even think about buying it. They collect a lot of data about
each person’s buying habits and have such confidence in how the data they
collect helps them recommend items to its customers and now predict what they
need even before they need it by using predictive analytics.
In a time when many brick-and-mortar stores are
struggling to figure out how to stay relevant, America’s largest e-tailer
offers a new convenience store concept called Amazon Go. Unlike other stores,
there is no checkout required. The stores have artificial intelligence
technology that tracks what items you pick up and then automatically charges
you for those items through the Amazon Go app on your phone.
Since there is no checkout, you bring your own bags to
fill up with items, and there are cameras watching your every move to identify
every item you put in your bag to ultimately charge you for it.
4. Apple
Apple, one of the world’s largest technology
companies, selling consumer electronics such as iPhones and Apple Watches, as well as computer software and online
services.
Apple uses artificial intelligence and machine
learning in products like the iPhone, where it enables the FaceID feature, or
in products like the AirPods, Apple
Watch, or HomePod smart speakers, where it enables the smart assistant
Siri. Apple is also growing its service offering and is using AI to recommend
songs on Apple Music, help you find your photo in the iCloud or navigate to
your next meeting using Maps.
5. Microsoft
Artificial intelligence is a term that appears on
Microsoft's vision statement, which illustrates the company’s focus on having
smart machines central to everything they do. They are incorporating
intelligent capabilities to all its products and services, including Cortana, Skype, Bing, and Office 365,
and are one of the world's biggest AI as a Service (AIaaS) vendors.
6. Facebook
One of the primary ways Facebook uses artificial
intelligence and deep learning are to add structure to its unstructured data.
They use DeepText, a text
understanding engine, to automatically understand and interpret the content and the emotional sentiment of the thousands of posts (in multiple languages) that its
users publish every second.
With DeepFace, the social media giant can
automatically identify you in a photo that is shared on its platform. In
fact, this technology is so good, it’s better at facial recognition than
humans. The company also uses artificial intelligence to automatically catch
and remove images that are posted on its site as revenge porn.
7. IBM
IBM has been at the forefront of artificial
intelligence for years. It's been more than 20 years since IBM's Deep Blue
computer became the first to conquer a human world chess champion. The company
followed up that feat with another man vs. machine competitions, including its
Watson's computer winning the game show Jeopardy. The latest artificial
intelligence accomplishment for IBM is Project Debater. This AI is a cognitive
computing engine that competed against two professional debaters and formulated
human-like arguments.
