The Rise of the Machines: AI in Action — Pioneering Use Cases
Driving Efficiency, Customer Delight, and Reshaping Business Landscapes
The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer a distant dream or a sci-fi fantasy — it’s a reality that’s reshaping industries and redefining the boundaries of human ingenuity. While debates rage on AI’s impact on employment, forward-thinking organizations are already harnessing its immense potential, unlocking new realms of efficiency, cost savings, and customer delight. From the hallowed halls of tech giants to the bustling kitchens of restaurants, AI is proving its mettle as a transformative force.
Let’s dive into the fascinating world where AI optimizes logistics with surgical precision, accelerates content creation to unprecedented levels, and even tries its hand at software development. From the BCG report, we already know that AI delivers value, no matter the investment size, whether it’s an increase in revenues or a reduction in costs. A sneak peek into how different organizations use AI at scale to make it profitable for them can help paint a better picture.
Amazon’s Package Decision Engine
Amazon’s legendary recommendation engine is known to have revolutionized shopping for hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Building on its success, Amazon is now using AI to optimize packaging and save billions in shipping costs. The Package Decision Engine, which Amazon developed in-house, analyzes each product or shipment’s packaging needs, such as cardboard envelopes, boxes, paper dunnage, tape, and paper bags, based on the product’s durability and historical data about the state of shipments at destination. It continuously learns from incoming data and improves packaging to simultaneously achieve cost savings, wastage reduction, and shipment durability. It even knows when to use special packaging like shrink, multipack, box, etc. Since 2015, the engine has reduced wastage by about 2 million tons of packaging materials.
Amazon’s Delivery Optimization Engine
Many people need to remember that Amazon is a data analytics powerhouse on top of being an e-commerce giant. So, it’s only natural that they churn out more AIs than most other organizations. One of their latest creations is an AI that streamlines and optimizes delivery routes. And it’s not a typical travelling salesperson problem algorithm either. The AI considers traffic, weather, and other factors to optimize the routes. Moreover, the AI even predicts the geographical areas from where the orders are more likely to come and uses the predictions to minimize delivery time. Now, the company boasts that its quickest dispatch was made within 11 minutes of order placement for same-day delivery!
Robot Cooks
Social media users have been going gaga over AI-based robot chefs for some time now. Whether it’s Walmart’s Luigi, Flippy’s CaliExpress, Café X, or RoboBurger, they all promise a superior culinary experience for foodies. Restaurants love them. Although these robot chefs are not entirely independent and require human employees to assist them — to restock ingredients, for instance, periodically — they have proven that they deliver on the promise. The icing on the cake is that robot chefs like RoboBurger can be operationalized by restaurants at scale as they can be purchased in retail.
Adobe’s Firefly Services
It’s not just physical labor that AI is taking over. Adobe’s Firefly Services packs generative AI and creative APIs into a formidable toolkit that allows content creators to speed up their work by speeding up workflows. Many creative tasks like removing backgrounds, editing text layers, leveling horizon, etc. can be done automatically using Adobe Firefly Services. These tools allow brands, agencies, and creators to create new content at the speed and scale desired without substantially increasing their budget. The best part? By accelerating content creation, these tools allow more people to participate in the content creation and witness their ideas come alive in real-time.
Devin, the AI Developer
Microsoft’s Copilot has been assisting coders worldwide for nearly three years now. But, an emerging player in this space, Magic.dev, has launched what they have dubbed “the first AI software engineer.” Although Devin (the AI coder) does not perform on par with junior developers — let alone senior developers — at this time, it still marks a milestone in AI development. Presently, Devin can solve 13.86% of real-world open-source projects on Github unassisted, a drastic improvement from the previous record holders who clock in 1.96%.
Devin’s makers hope to improve it soon enough to perform at least on par with an experienced coder. If you’re thinking, “Well, is it time for coders to pack their bags?” Perhaps some coder humor circulating the web can offer some perspective on this matter.
The explosive growth of digital transformation has triggered a dire shortage of high-quality IT talent globally. AI coders can help organizations meet their IT needs by handling some of the easier and cognitively less arduous tasks, while developers can focus on the most complex tasks that AIs cannot tackle.
AI in Marketing
The marketing industry is prolifically using AI at every level to achieve superior results. Marketers are using AI to create brilliant ads, high-quality text content, creative imagery, full-length videos, voices, and more. There are so many examples of successful marketing campaigns created by AI that almost all marketers are now using AIs for at least some aspects of their marketing.
It is revolutionizing not just the creative aspect of marketing but also the tech aspect. AI tech allows advertisers to hyper-personalize and hyper-target their ads to their audiences, even as they actively identify and neutralize bot behavior online.
Wrapping Up
As mentioned earlier, the use offers some insight into how different organizations are already using AI at scale. Consumers have been using AI assistants in their smartphones for over a decade now and have grown familiar with them. So, they will not have a hard time working “alongside” an AI that will make their job easier, less labor-intensive, and more fulfilling.
While the threat of job loss looms over the future, that has been the case with every efficiency-inducing innovation forever, be it the steam engine or the 3D printers. The steam engine did not eliminate navigators, did it? And have 3D printers turned every household in America into a tiny manufacturing plant?
Of course, there’s no doubt that the arrival of AI will change the nature of almost every job out there. But it will likely impact the workforce in a way that improves its skills and work environment, much like the automatic factory uprooted factory workers from the nightmarish landscape of Industrial Revolution factories and put them in a more worker-friendly modern manufacturing setup. AI is a change — a big one — just like many before it. And its benefits are far-reaching for employers, employees, and their customers.
— Christina shares candid insights and ideas based on her work, network, and passion for mobile, payments, and commerce. As a frequent speaker by invitation to international events, from entrepreneurial and educational to executive audiences and settings, she has been recognized as a ‘Top B2B Influencer’ and ‘Who’s Who in Fintech’. She focuses on the latest product innovations and growth for people during the day while teaching students and mentoring entrepreneurs at night. Connect with her on LinkedIn or Twitter/X. All views are my own. —
