How is AI applied in companies?

In Germany, but also in Japan, employees and entrepreneurs are always asking us: How can artificial intelligence enrich my company and support the work processes? The first thing we always check is where the AI is to be used in concrete terms because there are three main possibilities.
With AI, companies can improve their products, such as medical devices or production-specific parts. In addition to saving time and resources, AI applications also enable entirely new and vital applications. For example, AI is already being used by many medical institutes to diagnose diseases such as cancer or skin lesions. This can save considerably more expensive procedures or the time needed for doctors to diagnose diseases. Another topic that concerns you and me more than ever today, and which is also accelerated based on AI, is the development of new vaccines. AI can test the efficacy of possible combinations of substances based on enormous amounts of data and develop new drugs from these. This is also currently being used to create a corona vaccine.
Companies can use AI to improve the internal processes of their departments. In production, robots can take massive and complicated work steps off the shoulders of your employees to reduce various work-related illnesses such as back and respiratory diseases. Even the production facilities themselves, independent of the different robots, can be equipped with intelligent components such as sensors and actuators. The topic of occupational health and safety is crucial here, for example, to protect production personnel from jamming or power surges. AI also opens up completely new possibilities for quality management and increasing the efficiency of production. Smart computers significantly accelerate the evaluation and adjustment of specific parameters, and the quality is continuously improved by image analysis and neural learning. As a result, companies predict that labor productivity can be increased by up to 40% by using AI.
Companies can use AI to optimize various services. As is well known, services are almost exclusively services performed by humans. This could mean that AI has to replace people to revolutionize services. This may be true in some cases, but in the service industry, too, it is mainly a matter of AI only supporting us. One example is the classic customer service we use at least once a week: Chat offers, or voice bots can intercept a specific part of the inquiries and help the customer with problems (as long as they are well implemented). This relieves the call centers of the big companies enormously and offers a faster help than if the customer has to struggle through the whole waiting loop first. Therefore 38% of the companies believe that AI can improve customer service in the long term. For some specific problems, however, your employees are still needed to deal with the products extensively.

Another example is the shopping giant Amazon: Here, besides the call centers, virtually everything else is built on artificial intelligence. From warehousing and dispatch centers to product suggestions or even the answers the language assistant gives you. These are all types of services that are made possible and improved continuously with the help of AI.
In addition to these examples, there are countless others, such as how AI influences our professional environments, making our lives easier (and sometimes probably more difficult). In our MEJOIN consortium, we try to find precisely those applications for companies that offer the most added value, the least effort, and the lowest costs. It is clear that not everything is possible yet, but many developments are much more advanced than we had previously assumed.