Adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) around the world and its impact on organisations and societies is enormous. AI adoption rate varies across geographies, industries, and organisations. Larger organisations are highly likely to have actively deployed AI in their business operations, compared to smaller organisations which are either exploring or not considering AI at all at this stage. Approximately 34% organisations across the globe now are using AI, whereas 42% organisations are exploring AI for their business operations. Yet AI is a highly debated issue in the society due to uncertainty of its role, use and implication for the society in the future.
AI is playing a crucial role in addressing widespread skills and labour shortages affecting the most industries around world. Organisations are also seeking help from AI to improve their recruitment and retention policies, which can help acquiring more diverse and empowered workforce equipped with innovative skills and training. New AI technology enables software and tools helping organisations to save time, particularly in the business areas where skills shortages exist. One in three (35%) organisations, particularly the large organizations, are claiming that they are reskilling their workers to effectively work with advanced AI and the software and tools used for automation. Most of the organisations are also adopting AI to improve productivity of customer service officers, offer a better personalized experience for their customers and employees, and streamline processes pertaining find information and address frequently asked questions by workers and consumers. Reportedly, 98% of Chinese companies are using AI to enhance customer care, improved productivity of customer service agent, reorganise processes used by workers and customers to locate information and personalised customer and employee experience. Countries like the US, the UK, Australia and Canada are most likely not using AI for customer care yet. Automotive industry is particularly using AI to provide a better personalized experience to their customers and employees. Most of the companies in the chemicals, oil and gas industries, and in the utility and environmental industry are actively using AI to provide personalised customer and worker experience. A major driver of AI adoption is accessibility which is making the implementation of AI in organisations easier. Most of the companies are exploring or deploying AI to automate but what exactly needs to be automated varies among industries. Therefore, organisations are actively investing in exploring AI and its future application. Larger organisations are investing more into embedding AI into their existing applications and processes whereas smaller organisations are mostly investing in research and development.
In addition to economy, AI is affecting societies in a number of areas such as politics, national security, and culture. Challenges can be divided into two categories, 1) technical, finding effective solutions to human interaction, addressing trust, safety and security issues and 2) moral and ethical issues pertaining to privacy, fairness, justice, discrimination, bias, deskilling, surveillance, and many other prickly issues associated to labor, workforce and consumers.
As AI technology continues to exert a great impact on organisations and societies, the issue of trust in AI has also been increasingly gaining importance. Most of the organizations which are using or planning to use AI technology are giving importance to trustworthiness however they have not taken effective measures to preserve consumer trust, such as they did not establish any protocols to identify and eliminate bias. Consumers, around the world, perceive trustworthiness of AI differently. While consumers in India and Latin America are most likely to prefer services from companies that are transparent and follow an ethical framework in how data and AI models are developed, managed and used, compared to other countries like France, Germany and South Korea. Most of the organisations greatly support establishing consumer trust in their processes of developing and using AI technologies, however only some organisations are able to codify these principles as part of their official rules and policies. Ethics to AI is relatively a new perspective and organisations are acknowledging lack of skills and training hindering to manage this aspect of AI.
Future of AI cannot be determined, and it can be developed in surprizing directions. Its future is dependent on a variety of things, including technological and policy decisions made by organisations today. For a better future of AI deployments, organisations need to develop noble policies. It is therefore, essential for researchers, academics, practitioners and even common public to have an insights of the development of AI and its impact on the society. This edited book intends to present an investigation into the AI adoption in various functions of the organisations across industries around the world and how organisations are responding ethical and technical challenges associated to this adoption.
This book is expected to attract AI researchers from various industries to present their research findings, opinions, and other artifacts explaining the impact of this disruptive technology on our personal and professional lives and what are its positive and negative impacts on our societies and how AI would unfold future of our planet.
This book is expected to address social, political, ethical, technical and many other challenges surfacing due to wide spread of AI adoption impacting societies facing the new challenges of AI adoption and how they can proactively overcome the challenges. It is one of first edited book will be covering AI adoption related challenges, impacts and effects in detail for both social and professional communities.
Audience: Target audience of this book are leaders, managers, executives of organisations who are keen to develop a holistic picture of the AI adoption situation. It is vital for academicians, researchers, and students from all disciplines, to learn and teach future technology and prepare graduates for seamless transition into industries. In addition, investors, economic analysts, policymakers, human resource managers, and other industry professionals eager to develop understanding on most recent deployment of AI projects and to adopt the ideas into their practice.