Watch out: AI to shake up these businesses

dubai - Healthcare, traffic management and stock trading will be disrupted in the GCC

Creation has always fascinated humans. From Da Vince to Steve Jobs, great personalities are immensely proud of their creations. Ever since the dawn of computers in the 1940s, artificial intelligence (AI) has fascinated research communities. Futurists during that time predicted that AI could be possible within the subsequent decade, while that turned out to be wildly optimistic, the AI phenomenon became a cultural icon through sci-fi movies, pop cultures and writings of Sir Isaac Asimov.

Self-learning and self-aware robots taking over the world and enslaving human beings has been a recurrent theme in movies such as the Terminator, The Matrix and the likes. While the debate of AI turning to evil is still going on, in the last two years, AI has made blistering progress.
The computers that we have today understand our commands as a set of 0's and 1's. Let's go back to the year 2000; you're looking to search a Japanese language book on the Internet. To do that, you had to either know the title of the book or the author or the ISBN code to get the desired result. Fast forward to 2017, and you can do that by just describing the book, or by simply pointing your phone to the cover of the book. Google's assistant or Apple's Siri can understand the natural language commands now - all thanks to AI.

AI's impact is widespread. Healthcare - diagnosis, analysis and treatment - can improve to a great extent with AI. Traffic management will not require too many personnel for identifying and punishing lawbreakers; AI can do that job more effectively and at a lower cost. Stock trading has already been done through algorithm-based trading platforms that execute orders at a fraction of a second without human intervention.

Shortage of healthcare personnel and increasing cost of services is a major concern for most of the nations, more so in the GCC countries since they depend on expatriates to deliver services. AI-based health assistants can be used for initial diagnosis of patients. These chatbots enquire about user symptoms and provide easy-to-understand information about their medical conditions. It would also provide steps to remedy the illness and could possibly even warn the users on to when to see their doctors.

The GCC is predisposed to type-2 diabetes and it requires managing food intake and constant monitoring of patients. Chip-based implants are also making their way into mainstream medicare which would again help AI-based health assistants to monitor the food and medicine intake of the patient. Google has patented a contact lens with a chip in it that measures the sugar levels from tears and alerts the user when the sugar levels go down.

Smart cities are being built all over the GCC. An interconnected city requires constant managing of traffic, clean water supply and fresh air supply. Sensors and cameras placed all over the city would serve as the eye of the AI, and it can determine how to manage traffic, record violations and send the necessary fine to the lawbreaker. Water supply and clean air supply would be automatically handled by AI - filling up the pumps, reserves at service stations, demand and supply forecasting are just some of the possibilities that AI has to offer.

GCC countries' stock markets have the some of the lowest liquidity in the world. Computer-aided trading or algorithm-based trading could help in improving stock market volumes. To start with, the region could look at algorithm-based trading whereby the computers would take the decision to trade depending on pre-defined rules which would ease the entry and exit of regional and international investors from the market.

Given the disruptive nature of AI, it could enter other fields as well - areas such as air traffic control and automated manufacturing. GCC is already a connectivity hub, but manufacturing has never really taken off here. This could be accomplished with AI and robotics.
The need of the hour is an efficient policy-making body with executive powers for AI applications for the GCC to efficiently manage the disruption that the technology is going to bring to the region.

The writer is managing director of Marmore Mena Intelligence, a research house focused on conducting Mena-specific business, economic and capital market research. Views expressed are his own and do not reflect the newspaper's policy.