Industry is increasingly digitized and digital business has become a reality for thousands of companies. One of the new digital tools whose excellent results have helpd consolidate its position is artificial intelligence, which is turning into a tremendous boon for industry.

What is AI?

Artificial intelligence is a multidisciplinary field that combines science (especially logic and computing) with philosophy and even fields as seemingly unrelated as linguistics. The main mission of this field is to create artificial entities that are able to solve problems effectively, and to perform tasks autonomously through algorithms or paradigms of human behavior.

There has been plenty of research and development of AI since the 90s, and over the course of these years it has helped identify the potential of human capital, allowing its performance and profitability to improve.

Today, it forms part of a large percentage of the products we use every day, such as smart TVs that can customize content, thermostats that study behavior to keep the house at an ideal temperature or mobile apps that identify musical tastes and create content according to preferences. Others are able to identify faces to apply filters or guess a person’s age, etc.

Applications of artificial intelligence

Many industries cannot resist the charms and advantages offered by artificial intelligence. For this reason, its main applications at present are the following:

• Virtual personal assistants. In recent years, chatbots have become widespread on websites: interactive services that help us in our search on the web.
• Finance. AI has become the perfect ally to detect fraud, predict market patterns or offer personalized service to each customer according to their preferences. Education. A variety of algorithms allow you to create personalized educational programs tailored to the searches and preferences of the user.
• Climate. Many measures are being taken to combat climate change, and research in this field is becoming very important. We now see, for example, intelligent buildings designed to reduce energy consumption.
• Healthcare. Artificial intelligence and Big Data are very useful to the health sector: if data and information about diseases and symptoms are collected, chatbots or virtual assistants can be created that, just by asking a few questions, allow the diagnosis of the patient’s disease. It also helps to detect genetic factors that may develop a disease in the future.

Artificial Intelligence in Industry

Although we usually associate artificial intelligence with the development of robots, the truth is that it is a very useful discipline and widely used in industry. It has achieved great technological advances in both software and hardware development, and also in computing and data transmission.

AI tools are a great support in industrial processes — they improve performance by making them more flexible and efficient. This is due to the way they work: they are able to operate independently and jointly with the other agents involved, with which they are networked.

How do we apply artificial intelligence in industry?

The first AI applications are being produced in common industrial activities: language recognition, environmental documentation, virtual personal assistants, warehouse management…

Thanks to Big Data, you can analyze large volumes of data and detect trends or patterns that will make manufacturing processes more efficient, while also reducing energy consumption.

AI is capable of learning by training, which will allow it to discover connections in networks that are not yet detectable to the human mind.

It has also led to the emergence of cobots, collaborative robots that work side by side with humans to improve production. They learn in a simple way, as a human does, but with the advantage of significant cost savings.

Technology, an ally of industry

The development of technology contributes to the improvement of productive processes. And, although according to many experts it will contribute to the destruction of jobs, it will generate other jobs different from traditional ones.