The current use of artificial intelligence (AI) is extensive. It is being used to automate front-office and back-office processes, improve data analytics, and enhance the employee and customer experience in a variety of industries. However, we are at the very beginning of the AI journey and there are many questions to be answered, not the least of which is what’s next in AI.

It turns out, AI has a big future and there is a lot of collaboration going on between global AI leaders to accelerate and scale innovation to get more value from AI. And one of the most significant contributions of AI both now and in the future is its ability to empower creativity and innovation.

Empowering Creativity

Right now we are in the emerging stages of AI. It is powerful but limited. It does one thing in a single domain very well, applying speed and accuracy to that task. However, the goal is to expand AI capabilities to be able to multitask over multiple domains, taking information from one domain and using it in another domain.

This extends to creative capabilities. AI currently has the ability to do a number of creative tasks. It can take an image and produce a natural language caption. It can take a photograph and re-render it in the style of any painter/artist. It can create a photo-realistic image based on unstructured data.

This ability to create a photo-realistic image from the AI’s “imagination” is possible with the use of the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) model. This GAN can be manipulated to activate and deactivate different units to add and remove aspects of an image. For example, a window can be added to or removed from an image.

The goal here is to use AI not only to predict or make a decision but to generate. This generative AI can be put to many different uses, such as creating new recipes for food companies, new perfume fragrances for fragrance makers, and new concrete formulations that are more environmentally friendly. It can even be used to develop data science that has a higher level of safety and privacy, which is useful for financial institutions or any organization that deals with personal customer data. Ultimately, these generative uses of AI can lead to better business outcomes.

Even in the business sector, generative AI can be used in a creative capacity. An example of this is generating arguments from various points of view. This can include the data-driven writing and delivery of a speech and listening comprehension that will allow the AI to model human dilemmas to understand the various issues from different points of view.

Ultimately, the future of AI is not going to just be about taking data and making a prediction or informing business decisions, but to actually synthesize and create in a way that empowers humans and make us be better able to see both sides of an issue, create a product, create art, or design something. This is a powerful path for AI.

The Ability to Scale

AI not only has the power to generate, but also to scale. Take the oil and gas industry. It is possible to use AI to oversee maintenance activities and communicate those activities to workers in the field. Whether you have one platform or 50, this solution can easily be scaled accordingly and can change with the needs of the company.

AI can also perform federated learning, which is the ability to build a composite model from distributed data. This is invaluable in the finance industry, which handles significant amounts of personal data. To handle this data at a large scale would traditionally require all the data to be transferred to a central data store. This comes with risks, such as data breaches and non-compliance with regulations.

In this situation, federated learning can manage distributed data, learning from each local or private dataset and then developing a global model that allows for the delivery of sensitive data updates to the central server. This avoids bringing all the data to a centralized location and allows data owners to retain complete control over their data.

Ultimately, AI has a lot of potentials to improve creativity and innovation at any scale. Individuals, companies, and industries can harness the power of AI to drastically increase the value gained from this technology, driving business outcomes and fueling new ways of solving problems that rely on data access and analysis.