We’re creating vast amounts of data every day as we browse the web, use our phones, upload photos and send emails. To understand, organise and utilise this vast amount of data (whether for good or for bad) we’re increasingly turning to Artificial Intelligence (AI). For many years now AI is affecting our lives from moment to moment and sometimes without us even realising. In a time of virtual assistants, self driving vehicles and personalised advertising, how is AI impacting our lives right now?

Your social media feeds

When ever you log into Facebook, advanced AI jumps into action and collects all of the posts and updates from the pages and people you follow. From this it ranks them in an order of how worthwhile you’ll find them. This means that your news feed is always heavily filtered – there are thousands of posts you’ll never see.

In this instance, AI is controlling what you see from your network and how you engage with it. In fact, it sometimes goes a bit further – you may remember a past news story whereby the social network tweaked it’s news feed algorithm to make users either happier or more sad.

Your email inbox

AI is also hard at work protecting you from internet spam in the form of your email inbox junk folder. In fact, Google is now blocking an extra 100 million spam messages every day utilising artificial intelligence and they’re not the only ones.

Microsoft also utilises AI to provide users with a focussed inbox that automatically sorts emails in line with their predicted importance and urgency to you. This feature improves with time as Microsoft’s AI learns how you interact with certain types of email and different recipients.

Monitoring for fraud

When you consider the number of people that use their credit or debit card each day and then multiply this by the number of transactions, you’ll end up with a pretty huge number. If you had to rely on humans to manually check for fraud patterns you’d never prevent it from happening.

This is why most financial institutions employ AI to automatically analyse your typical spending patterns and block any that appear suspicious. It can be slightly irritating when you’re trying to buy something, however routinely saves people from losing their entire bank balances.

Every time you get on a plane

When we travel via aeroplane we are actually being guided by AI for the vast majority of our flight. In fact, the average journey on a Boeing plane involves just seven minutes of human-steered flight (typically for landing and takeoffs). The rest of the time advanced AI is taking care of all the navigating and piloting.

Facial recognition

AI is being increasingly being utilised for facial recognition across a number of fields. As well as being used to recognise the faces of wanted criminals, AI is now going one further by analysing facial features and predicting individuals that are most likely to commit crime.

Equally, Microsoft Sharepoint utilises image tags and facial recognition to work out which of your contacts is appearing in your photos. After a small period of learning, Sharepoint will start labelling them automatically.

Credit applications

AI has already begun to change the lending and loan management industries and will only continue to further embed itself. No longer is your credit application solely approved by a human.

This process is now at least partially completed by algorithms that can decide whether you are approved or denied your mortgage application.

What you watch and what you buy

It’s no secret that services like Netflix are getting better and better at predicting what we want to watch and this is down to powerful AI. Netflix and various other companies utilise algorithms to anticipate your needs to ultimately keep you engaged for longer.

Similarly, Amazon has become a king at predicting what you want to buy and when you want to buy it by combining your past orders and your product search history.

Productivity

There are many tools now that use AI to understand how you spend your time and suggest ways that you can become more productive. In fact, Microsoft 365 includes MyAnalytics with Microsoft 365. MyAnalytics summarises how you spend your time at work, then suggests ways to work smarter – from cutting unproductive meeting time to getting better work/life balance.

Final thoughts

If you’re interested in how you can utilise the power of AI to benefit your business, we’d love to discuss how Microsoft Sharepoint can automate your processes and give you more powerful insights. Contact us today for a no obligation conversation.