Across industries and functions, The real-world app is transforming how companies work. Drudgery like monitoring transactions, repeating the same tasks and sifting through endless documents could become the province of machines, freeing up human workers for higher-value work.

In banking, for instance, AI is reducing costs by tracing card usage and endpoint access to prevent fraud. It’s hard for humans to spot patterns, but AI is well suited to this task. And it can do it faster, cheaper and more reliably than human analysts.

WHAT IS THE REAL WORLD

Health care is another industry where AI is making waves. One company’s deep learning-based solution analyzes computer tomography (CT) images of lymph nodes, identifying small lesions that may be cancerous or other potential problems. Human radiologists typically charge $100 per hour and can carefully read only four images per hour. AI can identify up to 10 times as many potential problems at a fraction of the cost, enabling patients to receive more accurate diagnoses and faster treatment plans.

AI in the real world is also changing basic infrastructure and decisionmaking at cities and other public organizations. For example, Cincinnati officials use it to better understand how and where their city services are needed. This is allowing them to shift from responding to service requests in an ad hoc manner to taking a proactive approach that maximizes resources.

However, companies need to be careful when implementing cognitive technology in the real world. Rule-based expert systems and robotic process automation are transparent in their operations, whereas deep learning can be a “black box.” Research on reinforcement learning is helping to bridge this gap, but it’s critical that all companies carefully consider the pros and cons of different AI tools before they implement them.