An AI expo can be your window into AI innovations before they become mainstream. For entrepreneurs and business leaders like you, it’s an opportunity to preview AI-powered applications, tools, and solutions that can improve your productivity, business processes, product quality, marketing, and customer experience.
The exhibits in AI expos can spark ideas you can implement and run with. Ultimately, integrating AI into your business operations can be the key to gaining an edge over your competitors, increasing turnover, improving retention, and boosting profitability.
At your next AI expo, look forward to the iterations, variations, and applications of the following AI technologies or AI-powered innovations that may spark creative applications and implementations in your industry and business.
1. Automation Workflows Built on Agentic AI
Automation is taking data from one place, processing it, and creating output in another, all without human intervention in between. With AI, automation has taken an agentic turn. AI has transitioned from a tool you use to speed up your tasks into an intelligent agent actively and independently executing multi-step workflows on your behalf.
To illustrate, an AI agent or several agents in a content marketing agency:
- Open SEO recommendations and client interviews
- Prepare content writing briefs
- Populate the task tracker
- Open the tasks tracker
- Decide who will work on which task
- Assign the tasks to staff by placing them on individual Monday boards
- Alert staff members on Slack
- Collect the output and log them in the tasks tracker
- Check the output against set criteria
- Return output that needs revising
- Follow up on task completion
- Notify you when outputs are ready for your review
In the above example, the agent or agents work independently to orchestrate the workflows, enabled by the Agentic Resource Discovery Specification (ARDS) that allows agents to discover web services and interact with application programming interfaces (APIs) on demand.
What It Can Mean for Your Business
You can assign the routine and repetitive tasks of your workflows to AI agents, freeing up your staff’s time for more creative and strategic work. You can also create customer-facing agents that do more than just answer questions.
Example: The Style Concierge Agent
For instance, a fashion house can create a style concierge agent that helps customers find tailored recommendations based on their preferences. For instance, a would-be customer tells your agent they want (e.g., a pastel-colored wedding outfit in a fabric that suits the summer weather in France).
The style concierge checks your store’s real-time inventory, chooses and discards items based on the customer-provided criteria, and, using its styling training, puts together complete, styled outfits for your customer to shop.
The customer experience is better because they can use natural language to dictate what they want to achieve. No need to toggle filters.
The styled outfits, meanwhile, provide visual and readily selectable options. They minimize conflict, distraction, and confusion and may increase the likelihood of a purchase. Since customers are presented with complete looks, the average revenue per user may even increase.
2. AI-Powered Real-Time Agent Assist
A business can have AI assistants trained on company-specific data. Whenever a member of the staff has to make a decision, they can call on their AI assistant for help in pulling up customer data, checking product information, reviewing applicable company policies, etc.
What It Can Mean for Your Business
Your frontline personnel can have deep context to guide customer interactions. This enables them (and your business) to deliver superior service and resolve customer concerns faster and better.
Example: The Customer Service Agent’s AI Assistant
You want more pleasant customer interactions, better customer handling, and faster issue resolution. In this case, you can add AI as a layer over your current communication stack to assist customer service agents in real time.
While a member of your customer service staff is talking to a customer, the AI assistant is feeding them live customer data from various company databases. Your staff gain immediate context, immediately determining when the last transactions took place, their dollar value, and what products were purchased.
This can minimize frustration on the part of customers who don’t have to give lengthy explanations about which transactions they are talking about.
3. Physical AI & Context-Aware Industrial Robotics
AI with spatial intelligence can understand three-dimensional, physical environments. In other words, it has depth perception.
Physical context awareness in AI means AI-powered robots that can work in plants, on factory floors, assembly lines, and other physical work environments side-by-side with human workforces.
What It Can Mean For Your Business
Spatially aware AI means you can automate systems that can navigate complex, dynamic environments with the same awareness as a human, significantly reducing operational downtime and enhancing worker safety. It enables seamless integration into existing manual workflows.
Example: The Smart Assembly Floor
A humanoid robot is equipped with a light detection and ranging (LiDAR) camera and an inertial measurement unit (IMU). Instead of an algorithm to guide its decisions, it is powered by spatial AI.
The artificial intelligence enables it to situate itself within its physical environment and perceive the placement of static and moving objects within its range of vision. More importantly, it learns as it works.
Using its contextual knowledge, it can make decisions in response to stimuli. This is how it can continue moving, continue working without missing a beat, perhaps twisting its torso a different way or altering its path on the spot if a human crosses its path.
Likewise, a humanoid robot on quality control duty would stop the line for a misaligned or misconnected bolt, but instead of throwing an error that requires an engineer to come down on the floor, it would remove the bolt, clean it, fix it (if needed), and reattach it, all based on what it has learned autonomously while on floor duty.
4. Photonic/Analog AI
Photonic edge accelerators use photons instead of electrons to perform operations at the speed of light. Analog processing allows in-memory computing, which minimizes the constant data travel between the processor chip and the memory chip in digital computers; this minimizes speed throttling and energy drain.
A photonic AI platform can accomplish tasks in a fraction of the time and energy that electronic processors do. Analog in-memory computing collapses physical sensing and inference into a single local layer, which further reduces power demands.
What It Can Mean for Your Business
By adopting AI on photonic and analog infrastructure, you can significantly reduce your operational costs while enhancing your speed and efficiency in handling complex computational tasks in real time.
Example: Ultra-Fast Medical Diagnostics
Typically, diagnostic clinics upload their high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT), or retinal scans to third-party cloud servers for analysis by software. Such software typically requires massive computing power to run.
This type of workflow means clinics have to pay a fortune for cloud infrastructure.
As a solution, the clinic can install a photonic/analog AI diagnostic platform in the imaging department. After scans, the raw, uncompressed visual data is directly fed to the photonic chip instead of being compressed and uploaded to a third-party cloud server.
This doesn’t only mean zero latency in data transfer but also an accurate analysis in milliseconds. Additionally, since sensitive patient data never gets transmitted to a third-party, offsite server, the clinic ensures data privacy compliance and avoids incurring margin-crushing cloud infrastructure costs.
Note: Of course, cloud technology is not stagnant and is developing apace with the systems and technologies that run on it. Learning about these cloud developments is important to keep costs down and leave your options open, which is why you should attend Cloud Connect Expo, the conference on cloud infrastructure.
Learn About AI Breakthroughs
AI has come a long way since that day ChatGPT brought it to mainstream consciousness, and you must keep up or lose out. This is why you should attend AI expos.
