Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to grow thanks to its transformative capacity, driving relevant advances in fields as diverse as medicine, communication or logistics. Thus, most economic sectors are exploring the possibilities that lie ahead and the challenges that arise in the face of the revolution that AI is causing.
This revolution is mainly reflected in the way of operating, offering services and communicating with customers, which little by little are changing the way organizations operate. Although it varies depending on the sector, industries such as banking, healthcare, energy or consumption are already adapting their production and business areas to AI.
This way they can advise their clients in a more personalized way, improve primary care and manage available resources more efficiently. In addition, AI will become even more integrated into our daily lives, becoming an omnipresent companion. Its adoption may respond to the strategic priorities of the business, the operational particularities of the company itself and the demands of the social and regulatory context.
Thus, its influence is transforming the way companies operate and relate to their customers and employees, optimizing their internal processes and addressing global challenges such as sustainability. For example, AI applied to banking and insurance will allow an extension of financial advice to the general public, such as recommendations on the level of spending, debt capacity or the maintenance of the purchasing power of savings, as well as the implementation of projects to “break” the traditional system of risk calibration and pricing or the evaluation and measurement of claims.
In healthcare, the development of new initiatives in medical diagnosis to improve primary care, the automation of triage or the development of self-service in simple actions to alleviate the pressure derived from the increase in demand and the opportunity cost of qualified personnel, They will be some of the new functionalities that the sector will experience thanks to AI.
Consumption is one of the areas that can obtain the most benefits from AI, such as better inventory management, prediction of product demand or a greater understanding of the customer’s real needs, improving commercial processes and helping them in the decision making with personalized recommendations. “AI is already an accelerator of business competitiveness. For this reason, companies must be aware of their virtues applied to the sector in which they operate and exploit all the possibilities it offers, establishing mechanisms that favor scalability internally and that allow their real impact to be evaluated and measured,” declares Natalia Clavero, global director of AI at Minsait (Indra).
AI will also play a key role in the field of sustainability, a fundamental axis in companies’ business models, since it allows the optimization of organizational resources, as well as their application for sustainability purposes. In the energy sector, AI anticipates and plans the energy generation mix (renewable and non-renewable), as well as the integration and management of distributed energy resources (prosumers) and the effectiveness of new non-fossil sources of energy. In addition, it is capable of analyzing and forecasting sudden, sharp and localized changes in climate, as well as calibrating the risk of natural disasters.
AI, especially thanks to the contribution of generative AI, is rapidly evolving towards the improvement of interpersonal communication, that is, the ability to understand and generate textual responses in real time that is already transforming the way we communicate in online, as is the case with more intelligent virtual assistants. As it progresses, ethical concerns arise. For this reason, different governments address questions about how to avoid biases in the models or how to guarantee their transparency and understanding of the decisions made by the algorithms.
These questions will have to be answered in the Artificial Intelligence Regulation, the document approved by the European Parliament to avoid the associated risks without questioning the potential capacity for innovation, progress of companies and level of impact. In this sense, Clavero states: “The European Union has taken the initiative in the regulatory field and should now bet heavily on the generation in its territory of large initiatives that represent a breakthrough in the application of AI. All actors involved must ensure that artificial intelligence systems introduced on the European market and used in the EU are secure and respect fundamental rights and EU values.”
