Artificial intelligence has been here for years. As per a report by Forbes Advisor, AI can improve business operations by 56%, enhance cybersecurity by 51%, build better customer relationships by 46%, increase personalized product recommendations by 33%, and so on.
The rising popularity of generative AI applications like ChatGPT, Bing, Google Bard, etc., has added to the debate. Now, sentient AI joins the list to take the technology to new avenues. While sentient AI is not entirely new, it is now being adopted to streamline different business operations like customer service, logistics, etc.
But what exactly is sentient AI? How is it different from traditional AI? What is the future of AI for business?
Let’s find out in this blog.
What is Sentient AI?
Sentient AI is a type of artificial intelligence that has self-awareness, emotions, and feelings like humans. While traditional AI performs tasks based on the algorithms it has been trained on, sentient AI goes beyond this to have a consciousness of its own.
Generative AI can respond to human languages and interact like humans do. Still, it doesn’t have the human consciousness. However, sentient AI is sophisticated and stimulates emotional experience. This leads to certain complicated questions like whether sentient AI is alive, which would then result in ethical concerns about its usage.
However, from the business perspective, sentient AI is a powerful tool for innovation, problem-solving, personalization, etc. The roles of sentient AI for business are extensive as it can be used in healthcare, consumer goods, retail, IT, and many other industries.
Sentient AI Goes Beyond Traditional AI: Applications and Use Cases
The biggest difference between sentient AI and traditional AI is the type of intelligence used. In traditional and generative AI, the models use cognitive intelligence to understand the input and provide an output based on how it has been trained. But in sentient AI, intelligence relies on emotions, feelings, and subjective experiences. Though we can’t ignore the advantages this offers, we need to handle the models with care.
Here are a few applications of sentient AI across different industries:
Healthcare
Sentient AI can create personalized patient care plans based on their medical history as well as their emotional state. It is not limited to diagnosing physical ailments but can also offer support for emotional and psychological issues. Sentient AI can provide emotional support and therapy to patients and guide them through their recovery process with greater empathy.
Marketing
Sentient AI in marketing can further expand the personalization of newsletters, ad campaigns, and other forms of promotions. Since this AI deals with emotions, it can measure the emotional impact the promotional material can have on the target audience. This helps businesses create compelling campaigns tailored to suit customer behavior and reactions. Businesses can get in-depth insights about how their marketing strategy impacts consumers and what can be done to achieve the desired results.
Education
The educational sector can also benefit from using sentient AI. In this field, they can act as personal teachers/ tutors for students by developing learning models based on the strengths and weaknesses of each student. The feedback provided by sentient AI applications can be emotionally supportive and encourage the students in the right direction.
Customer Service
While generative AI chatbots can provide useful responses to customer queries and complaints, using sentient AI can help in providing emphatic answers and maintaining proper customer relationships in the long term. This can help strengthen the customers’ emotional connection to the brand and enhance loyalty. It also provides greater personalization in resolving complaints.
Transportation
Sentient AI can also streamline logistics and transportation by making informed decisions about the best route to travel in traffic conditions, avoiding accidents, and optimizing delivery schedules to take the products from the warehouse to distributors/ end users. Furthermore, sentient AI has a role in making autonomous vehicles safer and more efficient for everyday use.
Security
Sentient AI can be useful in defense and security industries to measure threats and risks in real time. It can use emotional intelligence to understand human behavior and reactions to predict attacks and find ways to neutralize them. This can result in providing greater security for the public. However, privacy and ethical concerns have to be addressed before using sentient AI for security measures.
Environment Protection
Another role of sentient AI is to predict the occurrence of natural disasters and streamline help management and relief measures to minimize loss of life/ property. It can also offer complex insights into climate change and provide solutions to avoid the situations or reduce the impact. Sentient AI can be useful in optimizing the use of natural resources and finding alternate sources of renewable energy.
The Future of Sentient AI
There’s no denying that the future of artificial intelligence is bright as it becomes more powerful and efficient. However, we also need to first address the various concerns and challenges posed by the use of sentient AI.
Factors like bias (gender, race, religion, etc.), data privacy, discrimination, fear of loss of jobs, over-dependency on technology, disruption in social and economic aspects, etc., have to be dealt with by the involved parties. To a great extent, businesses can find a way around these concerns by partnering with AI service provider companies.
In the future, sentient AI can be used in the following fields:
·AI governance framework development
·Virtual personal assistants
·Research and collaboration in interdisciplinary fields
·Enhancing human capabilities (decision-making, memory, cognitive skills, etc.)
Additionally, the artificial intelligence community is currently more focused on artificial general intelligence (AGI) to make the systems efficient enough to handle jobs performed by humans and eliminate the risk of error. Sentient AI is something to work with later down the years when the regulations are more specific and offer much-needed clarity to the business world.
Conclusion
Sentient AI can be highly beneficial for businesses to achieve great heights. However, the first step to adopting this advanced technology is to answer the ethical concerns about privacy and bias. However, as the developments in artificial intelligence progress, we are likely to find innovative solutions for the concerns.
AI service providers like Pro Minds AI Labs offer tailored solutions for SMBs and large enterprises to adopt artificial intelligence technologies to streamline business across all verticals.
Talk to our experts to know how sentient AI can be the future of your business and help you become an industry leader.