Artificial intelligence across industries

Executive summary

Artificial intelligence is currently attracting considerable interest and attention from industry, researchers, governments as well as investors, who are pouring record amounts of money into the development of new machine learning technologies and applications. Increasingly sophisticated algorithms are being employed to support human activity, not only in forecasting tasks but also in making actual decisions that impact society, businesses and individuals. Whether in the manufacturing sector, where robots are adapting their behaviour to work alongside humans, or in the home environment, where refrigerators order food supplies based on the homeowner’s preferences, artificial intelligence is continuously making inroads into domains previously reserved to human skills, judgment or decision-making.

While artificial intelligence has the potential to help address some of humanity’s most pressing challenges, such as the depletion of environmental resources, the growth and aging of the world’s population, or the fight against poverty, the increasing use of machines to help humans make adequate decisions is also generating a number of risks and threats that businesses, governments and policy makers need to understand and tackle carefully. New concerns related to safety, security, privacy, trust, and ethical considerations in general are definitely emerging together with the technological innovations enabled by artificial intelligence. These challenges are common to all societies across the globe and will need to be dealt with at the international level.

The present White Paper provides a framework for understanding where artificial intelligence stands today and what could be the outlook for its development in the next 5 to 10 years. Based on an explanation of current technological capabilities, it describes the main systems, techniques and algorithms that are in use today and indicates what kinds of problems they typically help to solve. Adopting an industrial perspective, the White Paper discusses in greater detail four application domains offering extensive opportunities for the deployment of artificial intelligence technologies: smart homes, intelligent manufacturing, smart transportation and self-driving vehicles, and the energy sector.

The analysis of various specific use cases pertaining to these four domains provides clear evidence that artificial intelligence can be implemented across and benefit a wide set of industries. This potential is paving the way for artificial intelligence to become an essential part of the equation in resolving issues generated by today’s and tomorrow’s megatrends. Building upon this analysis, the White Paper provides a detailed description of some of the major existing and future challenges that artificial intelligence will have to address. While industry and the research community constitute the principal drivers for developing initiatives to tackle technical challenges related to data, algorithms, hardware and computing infrastructures, governments and regulators urgently need to elaborate new policies to deal with some of the most critical ethical and social issues foreseen to be the by-products of artificial intelligence.

Standardization and conformity assessment are expected to play an essential role not only in driving market adoption of artificial intelligence but also in mitigating some of the most pressing challenges
related to decision-making by machines. As a leading organization providing a unique mix of standardization and conformity assessment capabilities for industrial and information technology systems, the IEC is ideally positioned to address some of these challenges at the international level.