Artificial intelligence, regarded as "essential" to competitiveness, will have a dramatic impact on businesses by 2020, according to a study by India's leading IT services provider Tata Consultancy Services.
Focused on the current and future impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the seventh Global Trends Study, concluded in June last year, polled 835 leading executives across 13 global industry sectors in four regions of the world, finding that 84 percent of the companies see the use of AI as "essential" to competitiveness, with a further 50 percent seeing the technology as "transformative".
Exploring the views and actions of decision makers from global companies with average revenues of USD 20 billion, the study revealed AI is spreading across almost all areas of a company.
The biggest adopters of AI today are, not surprisingly, IT departments, with two-thirds (67 percent) of survey respondents using AI to detect security intrusions, user issues and deliver automation.
However, by 2020, almost a third (32 percent) of companies believe AI's greatest impact will be in sales, marketing or customer service, while one in five (20 percent) see AI's impact being largest in non-customer facing corporate functions, including finance, strategic planning, corporate development, and HR.
Companies participated from a range of industries, including automotive, banking and financial services, energy, healthcare, life sciences, industrial manufacturing and retail. This cross-sector level of insight highlighted AI's workplace impact as an important supplemental force for the next few years.
Examples include guiding customer service representatives to more quickly resolve customer problems and anticipate future purchases, quickly and securely reconciling mass overnight transactions for financial institutions, or giving time back to HR professionals by managing the time consuming on-boarding processes for new hires.
As for the ongoing debate regarding AI's impact on jobs, business executives in the study estimated net reductions in each function by 2020 of between 4 percent and 7 percent.
However, companies with the biggest revenue and cost improvements from AI see the need for at least three times as many new jobs in each function by 2020 because of AI, as compared to companies with the smallest AI-related revenue and cost improvements.
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