For so long, Artificial Intelligence has been painted as the future. In many ways, this is spot-on. Each year, we see more and more instances of companies implementing AI.
Here’s the thing: It has officially caught on in enough industries, at a large enough scale, for the “AI is the future!” trope to be incorrect. It’s not the future. Not exclusively, anyway. Because it’s now the present.
Look across virtually every sector, and you will see a widespread use and deployment of AI services. Some industries have been created from scratch on the back of it. In many cases, it has taken existing business models and spun off entirely new ones. Just consider how much it has changed B2B activity. You can use AI at places like igleads.io to do all of your contact scraping, without having any experience using code or even AI services themselves.
Heck, AI is even impacting how legacy industries interact with clients. The medical field, for instance, will never be the same. Implementing AI is changing everything from how surgeries are performed, to how customer service is handled, to how patient wait times are streamlined.
All of this raises an interesting question: With AI so ubiquitous, where has it made the biggest difference? We dug into the data available with the Department of Commerce to find out.
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Where is AI Currently Most Prevalent?
Information technology is by far and away the clear winner here. This is the hypocenter for AI. Before it could start carrying out more complex tasks, basic information technology functions were the lifeblood of AI use.
While the name is somewhat ambiguous, information technology covers any field that traffics in the day-to-day use of computers, software and networks. Basically, if it has to do with managing, storing, processing or transmitting information, it falls under this umbrella.
If your first instinct after reading this description is to gravitate toward search-engine use, you’re spot-on. AI’s most early uses sought to speed up and better organize search processes. Its impact remains prevalent now, too. Look no further than the “AI Overview” you receive when using Google or another search engine.
This is far from all information technology encompasses. Computer programming falls into this bucket as well. As AI has become more advanced, it can code and design entire websites in minutes. Nowadays, some companies even use AI to manage all of their online networks.
To that end, experts estimate that more than 20 percent of the information technology sector is already run by various forms of AI. And for the time being, this number is only climbing.
Which Industries Will See the Most AI Growth in the Near Future?
If information technology is the first frontier for AI deployment, marketing and data analytics are the second. Consider what Maggie Smith wrote on the Department of Commerce’s official website:
“The top two applications for future AI utilization in the U.S are marketing automation and data analytics…An examination of U.S. sector-specific data reveals that numerous industries anticipate using these AI applications. For instance, AI-driven marketing automation is projected not only in sectors such as Real Estate, Retail, and Accommodation and Food Services but also in less obvious sectors like Construction, Education, and Agriculture. Similarly for data analytics, industries such as Utilities, Management, and Transportation and Warehousing are leading in projected AI use. However, even in sectors like Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation about one in five businesses that report future AI usage, expect to also use AI for data analytics.”
This makes sense when you consider the responsibilities and trends for each of these industries. Data analytics can be tedious, and computers are already used to execute the math and track trends. Using AI to also manage and store that data on a more frequent scale was always inevitable.
Automated marketing is not as obvious as a selection. At least, not until you really think about it.
So many consider marketing an industry predicated on building relationships—on people finding a way to make products and services resonate with other people. Well, this element of the industry isn’t going anywhere. The smartest and thorough business will still employ creatives to make their marketing practices stand out. When it comes to reaching customers, though, the entire process is essentially digitized. You are not drawing in clients by way of newspapers and billboards. You are reaching them on social media, via email, through strategically placed online advertisements and so on. AI can now not only handle the dissemination of marketing materials, but it will even build your client list from scratch, generating email leads that you can turn into potential customers.
Where Will Employment be Most Impacted by AI?
This is an awkward discussion. Plenty of people view implementing AI as an existential threat to their current job. It’s tough to discredit those concerns in some cases. Beating the efficiency of AI can be difficult.
Still, AI is not yet perfect for every industry. What’s more, there will be plenty of industries in which it actually creates jobs.
According to the Department of Commerce, industries like information technologies (estimated 10 percent), administrative and support services (8 percent) and even construction (8 percent) all forecast an increase in human employment over the near future.
Meanwhile, industries like finance and insurance (7 percent), real estate/rental and leasing (7 percent) retail trade (6 percent) and wholesale trade (6 percent) are among the industries forecasting the biggest decline
It is important to monitor these trends closely over six-month spans. Projections change quickly. Way back when, the prevailing consensus was that AI would first adversely impact employment rates in manufacturing, finance and insurance. Instead, we have seen AI make the largest employment dent for media, website design, programming and creative jobs of that ilk.
This is all to say: the process of implementing AI is evolving just as fast as growing. And while there are downsides to every innovation, a ton of industries continue to project employment-rate upticks for both the smaller and bigger pictures.
