by Amy Townsend

Artificial intelligence is one of the biggest opportunities for digital transformation and is increasingly becoming an integral part of digital business. AI can help speed up the process of understanding current information and make recommendations that can speed up business processes in turn. AI enables businesses to deliver an experience that resonates with customers in their physical and virtual worlds.

Artificial intelligence is changing the way the world does business, conducts medical research, delivers care, and even the way we manage personal schedules and interactions—capabilities that have had a critical impact during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Uncover new insights from your data.

While there are a plethora of key technologies advancing in the artificial intelligence space, emerging AI technologies present ample opportunity for potential transformation. We’ve identified several of them in our latest Technology Arc for Artificial Intelligence, and in this blog, we’ll discuss three of these key technologies:

1. Video Analytics
2. Perceptive Input Gesture/Emotion Recognition and,
3. Document Analytics

Video Analytics

Video analytics is the ability to identify people and images inside of a live or recorded video stream. This deep learning technology can keep track of what’s going on in a given area at all times. It can be used to detect motion, faces, heat maps, count people, recognize license plates, and more. This software will drastically reduce manual human hours spent reviewing and analyzing videos. 

Video analytics is an emerging technology to watch because it can be applied to a vast number of use cases. Not only can video analytics be applied to public safety and security, but enterprises can also leverage insights from video analytics to improve customer experience, speed up processes, rapidly gather data, and analyze unbiased feedback based on how users interact with a product. 

A more modern example would be related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Video analytics can be applied to monitor crowds, improve hospital hygiene, and even monitor supply inventory.

Just a few examples include: 

1. 1. • Monitoring shelf inventory
      • Detecting popular areas within a retail store
      • Monitoring human traffic flow in a given space (think about social distancing)
      • Facial recognition
      • Object, pattern, shape recognition (think about a strange backpack that’s been sitting in the same spot of a train station for a long time)
      • Research studies
      • Timing hospital employee hand-washing

Video analytics can open up a new level of customer insight, improve public safety and security, and enable employees to focus time on more productive activities. Keep an eye on this emerging technology. 

Perceptive Input: Gesture/Emotion Recognition

Perceptive input encompasses computer systems designed to interpret human input based on the perception of emotions or context. For example, rudimentary perceptive input can recognize tone and emotion based on language usage, visual cues, or gestures. Today, perceptive input is already delivering immediate value in product market and commercial testing. 

Researchers can use webcams to study the face of somebody watching a computer screen, and evaluate their emotional response to the subject on that screen. This can be extremely beneficial in areas such as commercial testing. For example, real-time objective feedback can be gathered from a study group watching a new commercial. This type of perception can also be beneficial in customer service settings, analyzing employee interactions, and even in educational settings—especially now that COVID-19 has forced many schools to operate remotely. With perceptive input, educators can analyze what teaching techniques are most effectively keeping students engaged, and provide a better learning environment while outside the classroom.

Document Analytics

Aragon Research defines document analytics as the use of analytics to derive insights from content where the concepts in the input source—higher-level abstractions of the meaning or the intent of the source—have been extracted and organized in a model that can be mechanically processed. 

Document analytics can support major use cases in contract and document construction, finance, and sentiment analysis on textual content. For example, attorneys can use this technology when producing new contracts. The document and content analytics technology will intelligently analyze clauses and create smarter contracts that have a higher chance of being approved by all parties. This will speed up the workflow of creating new documents and contracts. Finance can use document analytics to support sales by identifying contracts that include incremental revenue opportunities. This in itself is a huge opportunity that differentiates document analytics as a technology to watch. 

Bottom Line

Artificial intelligence is creating a new era of technology, and a new way for the world to operate. By implementing AI technology into routine processes, businesses will see happier customers, more productive employees, and ultimately more revenue. Video analytics opens new doors for data gathering, public safety, public health, operational efficiency, and more. Perceptive input offers a new way to gather accurate, objective data on human input. And finally, document analytics will speed up the contractual phase of various operations and enable businesses to track revenue opportunities that might have previously been missed. 

To learn more about these emerging technologies, including representative providers, check out our Technology Arc for Artificial Intelligence.