Top Benefits of Using AI in 2021:

Businesses that have deployed AI are seeing many benefits, including:

• Reduction of cost: as AI automates tasks that are low value and repetitive, it improves efficiency, reduces cost and improves quality. 

• Increased speed of execution: AI is reducing latency and helping businesses achieve operational efficiency and better business results.
• Improved decision making: by processing large amounts of data to detect patterns and using deep learning to make predictions, AI is helping companies make better decisions, remain proactive and profitable. 

• Personalized engagement: AI is allowing companies to become more engaged in their customers’ journey by offering personalized products and services at the right touchpoints and all through their life cycle. 

• Breeding a culture of innovation: businesses have the opportunity to harness insights from AI to restructure innovation from periodic events to a continual process. 

• Fostering trust: AI is changing the way businesses approach transparency in their data, processes and the way they interact with their customers. It is also helping companies to become secure against cyberattacks and frauds and helping breed trust amongst stakeholders. 

• Business continuity: businesses can use predictive analytics to get a sense of the risks and emergencies they face in their industries or even on a larger scale. AI-powered tools can help organizations respond to the crisis proactively and plan for a speedy disaster recovery strategy.

• Increased consistency: by automating repetitive tasks, AI helps businesses become more consistent. As robotic process automation tools take care of data entry and processing tasks, companies can minimize manual errors and improve the quality of their outputs.

Risks of AI in 2021

Research from Stanford HAI shows that some of the risks associated with AI are:

• Techno-Solutionism: as AI matures, it’s tempting to apply AI-based decision-making to every societal problem, but doing so can lead to biased outputs and discrimination.

• Disinformation: criminals, nation-states and extremists can use AI to manipulate people for economic and political gains. 

• Medical Discrimination: AI built without including human concerns has created discrimination, risk and mistrust. For instance, health information technology company Optum used a biased AI algorithm as a result of which Black patients receive $1,800 less in annual healthcare costs than white patients.