It’s not an exaggeration to say that almost every single business is questioning how AI will alter the commercial landscape in the future. Of course, the number one anxiety is that AI will render entire industries irrelevant. We’ve already seen certain creative fields like freelance copywriting shrink, Google adjusting its search engine algorithm to focus on user-generated content, and even the CEO of Nvidia warning young professionals to stay away from coding.
The outlook seems rather bleak. But that would only be half of the picture. Just as industrial dishwashers didn’t render restaurant pot washers obsolete, the truth is that most job roles will simply adapt and become more efficient than ever before. But such predictions are still a long way off, and it’s not clear how these changes will manifest themselves.
As such, any considered outlook is best kept restricted to a reasonable timeline. Say, the end of the decade, of which we have roughly five and three-quarter years left to experience. Most would agree that this decade struggled to get off to a good start, but perhaps such innovations will make its latter half more appealing than ever. With that in mind, let’s consider some of the following advice:
Enhanced Customer Service
Customer service is the name of the game if any company is hoping to serve clients or consumers for any amount of time. Even those who only deal with corporate contracts will know the value of retaining a single contract and moving forward adapting to their needs over the years, and responding to feedback when appropriate.
As such, it’s also important to consider how enhanced customer service will not only point to already-curated sources but can personalize each approach with AI. This excellent introduction to transformers guide shows how many different data sources and interaction points can help AI to develop and become more suitable for given tasks. We might expect, then, customer service call lines or message bots entirely run by AI, the phasing out of human teams, and the ability for creative solutions and account management to be routinely handled by such tools.
Personalized Marketing
Everyone knows how crazy the world became when Coca-Cola started to print limited-run bottles with first names on. There’s a great deal to be said for personalized marketing. It’s the reason why every account you sign up for (such as Google) will ask you to opt in or opt out of personalized marketing so advertisers can get a clearer picture of who they’re targeting and why.
With AI, these developmental efforts work overtime, for better or worse. This means that now we could expect not only consumers targeted within our region but perhaps based on other products you consume, the platforms you use, your lifestyle, and more. Maybe an algorithm determines that you’re flat-footed and thus will only ever recommend flat-footed footwear and gym apparel to you from then on, limiting your need to shift through a dozen normal sites before you find specialist gear. This will, of course, inflame interesting debates against privacy rights vs. the capabilities of targeted advertisementers.
Automated Processes
We can expect more and more automated processes to take root in business life, from digitizing paper documentation to extracting data from digital documents and formatting them in note-taking apps or collaborative tools.
We might also see automation in more structural, previously manual fields. A corporation’s recruitment department might implement metrics to scour resumes for, parse the writing quality and experience, and review them as appropriate.
Then as time goes by, the AI will have generated a helpful summary of the top ten most suitable candidates for a role, and allow the recruiter to select from them and move forward with interviews, perhaps even remotely. This can speed up the previously long and tumultuous recruitment journey, and perhaps even pair with additional background or vetting measures.
Workforce Optimization
Managers tend to offer broad goals and deadlines to meet, and in a healthy firm, autonomy is then given to the individuals working under the manager, reporting on their progress and collaborating efficiently.
However, it may be that some of this management approach is handed off to AI tools to help prioritize tasks, adapt certain plans when appropriate, generate working outlines, or even keep each staff member up to date on what each individual is working on. As collaborative suites and communication app utilities are slowly injecting AI into their user interfaces, we can expect these to become relied on more and more.
How firms choose to optimize in line with these utilities is not always easy. However, small measures, like AI tools generating a quick morning briefing for the manager with room for them to discuss more specific considerations, or providing a quick summary of the meeting after it’s concluded are utilities we can expect to become essential and even relied upon from firm to firm.
Portable Work Devices Will Be A Necessity
Some people are given a work phone by their bosses as soon as they start their position, but most just use that for calendar bookings, calls, texts, and apps like Slack. We can expect AI utilities (like Microsoft’s CoPilot) to become even more integrated within that economy of products.
For example, placing a smartphone down in the middle of a meeting and recording all voices, only for AI to note and categorize all points made can help individuals truly converse instead of taking their own minutes while in the midst of negotiations.
We can expect alternate measures too, from restaurant staff signing off on their evening cleaning duties by ticking off a digital checklist and verifying inspections, payment processors to limit customers before they’ve paid off outstanding bills, and better security vetting at point of sale machines. Put simply, it’s not just innovation in AI that matters, how many startups, entrepreneurs and established businesses will be looking to offer values on top of those tools, providing something new and custom-curated for the industry they know.
With this effort at prediction, we hope to have outlined some realistic possibilities for how AI might propagate in the commercial space until 2030.
