AI Applications – How to make AI work for people, corporations and a Viksit Bharat.

One question that gets asked most often when the topic of AI comes up. ‘What are the applications for me and my company?’?

On the one hand there seems to be a certain fatigue setting in among users, after the initial euphoria, now that they have generated enough pictures and essays. On the other hand, tech companies believe this will the biggest opportunity ever, and continue to pour Billions behind AI related technology and infrastructure. Competition is revving up among companies and nations alike to take a pole position.

However, some may argue that if the gap between tech and applications persist, AI may end up being yet another bubble.?

I am with the believers. I strongly believe that, with the right applications, AI has the power to transform lives in ways and scale not seen before. But to truly harness the potential of AI, we need to stop thinking in terms of technology (we must leave that to the tech geniuses) and start thinking about how AI can act as a force multiplier to human actions and how we as humans ultimately will shape our behavior due to AI.?

This piece will try and explore this aspect.

First, AI at a fundamental level, gives machines (computers) the ability to start thinking like human beings. This ability is still at an early stage but improving exponentially.? ?

Most AI applications started by addressing one parameter and are now adding more to become truly omni modal or multi modal. Take your pick of the terminology.

Thus, to develop AI applications, we need to start looking at tasks which are mundane for humans, or beyond human ability. Below is a starter list of 16 such possible AI assistants. These can be applied across all industries.

1. Office assistants - AI assistants that are trained and fine-tuned on enterprise data, which help employees in any function, access relevant information easily and create relevant documents – from presentations to spreadsheets, legal documents to business plans.
2. Research assistants – AI assistants that work with researchers to search or generate synthetic data, process data, formulate and tabulate results and prepare reports
3. Linguistic assistants – AI assistants that convert text to audio and audio to text. Translate text to text and audio to audio in any language. This can break all language barriers, especially in a country like India with a large number of languages.
4. Music assistants – AI assistants or tools that have the ability to understand music and songs and generate new music and songs. Combining this ability with human creativity will lead to generation of a vast amount of new music. Also add the ability to cut/ trim/ remix and we have an endless possibilities for new entertainment products.
5. Video assistants – AI assistants at this stage have good ability to understand video but are limited in video generation. This ability will improve. But they still offer great benefit in editing, production, scripting and special effects. Many tools enable easy creation of training and presentation videos.
6. Coding assistants – From coding in computer language to coding in your language is a transition being enabled by AI tools. They provide ability to read and understand code, debug code, write new code and assist in deploying the code. This enables a vast opportunity for almost any user to create a digital product by describing it in their language.
7. Accessibility assistants – AI applications will enable devices to provide access to people who may be impaired in some functions viz speech, hearing, sight etc. This will provide additional freedom and opportunity to such individuals.
8. Creative assistants – AI tools have ability to generate drafts of text, pictures, scripts, audio and video. Combined with human creativity, they can become assistants in brain storming ideas and developing an endless stream of creative content.
9. Public safety assistants – Cameras, mics and speakers at public places, enabled with AI can serve as eyes and ears with real time intelligence to flag off untoward incidents and announce alarms. It is not manually possible to watch or man all public locations, nor monitor video feeds real time. Vision AI watchdogs can do that for us.
10. Humané user interface – Most of the world’s information is digitized and is easily available. Yet most people struggle to access this information and utilize it in a meaningful way as they are constrained by a UI which they are not comfortable with. AI enabled interface that allows users to simply talk to their devices, the way they want, and utilize the information will democratize access. This will open up digital commerce and services segments to a much larger audience.
11. Healthcare assistants – AI can read and decode DNA like no human can. It can diagnose and provide prognosis. And then can be trained to create and a test a large number of new molecules for new drugs. They can read images from scans. All this means AI tools can accelerate advancements in medicine and healthcare, assist medical professionals in handling diagnosis at scale and empower them to deliver healthcare services speedily and affordably.?
12. Teaching (education) assistants – Rather than view AI as replacing teachers, it is more effective to look at them as becoming teaching assistants, supplanting the knowledge and pedagogy of teachers. AI tools can generate course material and tests, grade test papers and prepare reports, this enhancing the effectiveness of every teacher.
13. Personal assistants – AI assistants can help us manage our daily lives, meetings, documents, information, as a conversational friend when required and more. There are tools being developed to help health and mental wellness via a personal assistant.
14. Government assistants – Every citizen has multiple level of connections with the government. From fundamental rights and duties as a citizen to govt. services to taxation to govt. schemes and benefits. It gets overwhelming for most to navigate through all these services. A govt assistant can help every citizen with all the govt related duties and services, at a federal as well as state level.
15. Financial assistants – AI assistants that keep track of individual and/or enterprise finances, manage and navigate through the information and enable the most effective deployment.
16. Farm assistants – Farming may look like a simple task to city dwellers but is a challenging field full of risk and complexity. In a country like India where the majority owe their livelihood to farming, it becomes even more relevant to help the farmers. Evolution of AI farm assistants can keep the farmers informed, track the farming cycles and crops and take remedial steps at times of adversity. Integration with weather and soil data will help them significantly in taking the right decisions.

These are the most prominent 15 possible applications of AI. There can be many more specific applications.?

In sum, any task a human can do, AI can assist and make us do the job better and improve productivity. Start exploring these applications for yourself, today. At AI4India, we are working with AI companies and supporting them to develop applications across some of the these areas.?

Special acknowledgement Shashi Shekhar Vempati