One way of looking into the future that AI might bring is through Cognilytica’s four-part AI enabled vision of the future. In that vision, there are four main aspects in which AI will impact our future lives: the way we work, the way we live, the way we experience the world and our interactions with each other, and the relationship we have with data. (Disclosure: I’m a principal analyst with Cognilytica)

The New Workforce & The Always-On Organization

As technology progresses, the nature of work and labor rapidly changes. It is the purpose of technology to eliminate burdensome tasks and improve our daily lives. Technology is meant to increase our productivity, and allow us to live our lives to old age with increasing quality. We have always seen adjustments to the workforce when new technologies become available, especially in the areas of automation and augmentation. It should therefore be no surprise that organizations in industries of all types are looking to AI to change the way that they run their businesses. As such, the adoption of AI will necessarily and unavoidably change the nature of work. 

This is definitely the case for blue-collar work, which has already seen widespread change with the impact of robotics and automation. Automation has already replaced many positions in the area of manufacturing, but the bigger shift is not on the factory floor, but in the office cubicle. AI is eliminating much of the drudgery and repetitive work that has been farmed to service workers, or is otherwise taking up the time of more highly paid office workers. The use of various forms of process automation, from the less-intelligent, and ill-named robotic process automation (RPA) to the more intelligent cognitive automation forms, it’s clear that AI is here to stay in the organization. In the not-too-distant future, there will be just as many software and hardware bots operating the back and front offices of businesses as there are humans in the organization, and quite likely, many more bots than humans.

Another benefit and change that AI brings is the “always-on organization”. With the use of conversational agents and autonomous bots, there’s very little reason for businesses to close. Even after the humans go home, bots are operating, providing both the expectation and the reality that users can do business at any time they choose. This is not only limited to ecommerce and purely digital operations. The AI-enabled future means 24-hr coffee shops that are fully automated, and banks that no longer operate on “bankers hours”. In the AI-enabled future, businesses simply don’t have hours of operation. They’re always in operation. 

The future is Autonomous

AI is empowering the ability for autonomous operation of all types. Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is autonomous vehicles, but this is just one specific application of autonomous systems - and not even the best one. In the future, all modes of transportation will become autonomous, and this will bring about a change in the way we think of things like vehicles. If we think of it in conjunction with businesses like Uber or Lyft where you can essentially call a ride on demand whenever, you no longer need to own your own car if you can instead call one and it can show up whenever we need them. Our society is heading in a direction that lets us imagine these possibilities.

Autonomous everything doesn’t just mean autonomous vehicles. It means that we can have autonomous systems and operations of all sorts, from the autonomous software bots we described above performing the perfunctory work required in most processes to the vision of autonomous retail currently being innovated by Amazon Go and others. The combination of computer vision, machine learning, natural language processing, predictive analytics, and the world of intelligent sensors and devices means that we will be awash in autonomous systems of all sorts pervasive in our daily lives.

Enhancing the Human Experience

In addition to our work lives, AI will soon be a part of our overall human experience. We will come to use and sometimes rely on AI systems to enhance our daily interactions with each other, expand our creativity, and give us ways to express ourselves that we can’t otherwise do today. In the same way that spell check is part of the daily world of even the most casual of writers, AI will be used to give us powers of language translation and augmented creativity. Already, AI systems are helping those with limited artistic talents compose and produce original and powerful works of art and music.

AI systems are also having a great influence on how we communicate and socialize with each other. Humans are incredibly social creatures and one of the biggest developments to come out of machine learning technology is machine translation that can help humans understand and communicate in many languages. In the AI-enabled future, humans will be able to converse and interact with each other in the native language of choice, not having to worry about miscommunicating intentions. Machine learning models will be able to understand context, nuance, and colloquialisms that help to fill the gaps of human communication. This will make it easier for people who speak two different languages and don't understand each other to be able to carry on a conversation whether it is for business or for travel. AI is going to help us continue to meet our need to connect with others in meaningful ways. 

Changing our relationship with data: Pervasive Knowledge

The internet and mobile phones have completely changed the way we interact with others and the world around us. In the 1980s the concept of “pervasive computing” was nothing more than a pie-in-the-sky vision of everyone having computers available to them wherever they are, with instant access to data and information. It took just a few scant decades to make that vision a reality. Now we carry with us constantly-connected devices that have worldwide access to information. And now through AI, we’re moving beyond the idea of pervasive computing to pervasive knowledge. 

Pervasive knowledge is the idea that not only are we always going to be connected to the worldwide information grid, but all systems will have constant knowledge of what we are doing and how we’re doing it. This is the idea that people will already know things about you because of what is available for them through technology. On the positive side, this could mean a lot for disaster preparedness. If you think of instances such as an Amber Alert or tornado warning, 10 or 15 years ago you didn't get a text message when a kid went missing or a storm was imminent. The idea of pervasive computing made it an assumption that a text message would be sufficient to provide notification. But if you think about this, that’s a particularly non-intelligent way to do things. What if the system already knew that you were or weren’t in the path of a storm, could guide you to a safe place to seek shelter, and would additionally notify first responders if the storm hit the location where you were. This is the idea of pervasive knowledge made tangible, and it will impact everything from the way we shop to the way we live. 

The problem with pervasive knowledge is the “creepy” factor. To many, pervasive knowledge means pervasive surveillance. We don’t want systems to know where we are and what we are doing, yet we freely give this information away with our GPS-enabled phones connected to social media with cameras. While we might accuse governments or companies of tracking us without our consent, we are actually already freely giving this information in exchange for all the modern conveniences afforded by that pervasive connectivity. So too we’ll see people giving information to contribute to pervasive knowledge in exchange for even greater conveniences. 

The AI-enabled future will be a world where there is more access to all types of information and we are going to demand that those who have access to it use it smartly and use it for our benefit. This is going to mean that we're asking more of the people who have custody of this knowledge. We will demand that companies already know about us. We will demand that governments already have access to what they need to know. We won’t be patient with giving people information that we will presume they already should know. The future will be AI enabled and less patient.

We don't really know how soon or in what ways these visions of the AI-enabled future will become a reality, but even the most casual of observers can see that these are inevitable trends. The one thing that is certain is that it’s coming and we’re already heading in that direction. Companies are developing and investing in these technologies now. The future is AI enabled and it’s up to us to figure out what that means for our daily lives.

One positive aspect in this area of the AI-enabled organization is the realization that AI is making organizations much more responsive to their customer’s needs and desires. AI is making mass-customization possible for many different industries by leveraging the power of machine learning-enabled hyperpersonalization to tailor their offerings and build solutions customized for each individual customer, patient, client, or citizen. Through the use of conversational agents and autonomous systems, organizations are able to provide better customer service and better products and solutions to their customers by leveraging AI to churn through large quantities of data to build more accurate profiles of all of their customers. This impact can be felt even in the healthcare industry where AI is being used to provide personalized medicine and healthcare better tailored to individual patient needs. 

Source : https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/10/17/the-ai-enabled-future/#d35edc03339d