If you run a business or hope to one day, you’re doing something wrong in your research if you don’t know what Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence technology are yet.
Maybe it sounds like irrelevant high-tech mumbo jumbo to you, maybe you feel like you don’t need it to succeed. After all, there are countless business models that were the recipe for success, and they didn’t need AI! Well, you’re forgetting how long ago those business models were implemented, and how technology has changed life as we know it in the last decade alone. Most of those business models just aren’t relevant anymore, not to mention most businesses nowadays are depending more and more on AI and Blockchain technologies to streamline internal processes and better the services they provide to their customers.
If you hope to compete with bigger, more established businesses, you’ll have to take every advantage you can get, and that includes technological advantages. Use the power of machine learning and deep learning algorithms to your advantage and leave an impression. Keep reading to know more about how blockchain and AI technology can help your business.
What are Blockchain and AI?
For the average person, blockchain technology is much like how the internet was for people in the 1990s. Experts kept claiming that it was the next big thing, and the average person just didn’t quite get it. Well, those who took the time to understand the internet better got a head start, and are much more successful than everyone else who eventually caught on.
The simplest example is that of Facebook. It was created in 2004, while the internet was still just catching on, but being the first social media platform of its kind allowed it to quite literally change the world.
Experts assume that a new digital transformation is about to happen, and this time it will be blockchain and AI technology in the center of it all.
Blockchain Technology
Simply put, blockchain is a system of recording information in ways that make it almost impossible to hack or change. Once you enter a piece of data into the system, it will be there forever.
Blockchain technology is usually used to record online transactions, and it was originally used on transactions related to cryptocurrency. With the help of this technology, people were able to make financial transactions without the need of a third party establishing trust or mediating the process. People soon caught up to how useful blockchain could be in other ways as well, and of the usefulness of a system to ensure secure data sharing.
Another thing that makes blockchains favorable for keeping records of data is that all data is stored on a decentralized system, which makes it shareable and secure at the same time.
Artificial Intelligence
You can think of Artificial Intelligence technology as a bunch of machines pretending to be humans, making decisions, and trying to learn enough from the data humans feed into it to be able to make decisions and sometimes perform particular tasks.
The more scientific definition for AI would be that it is the simulation of human intelligence in machines programmed to act, think and make decisions like humans do. A piece of AI technology doesn’t necessarily have to be a mechanical robot that walks, talks, and behaves like a human. Sometimes it is just a little application in your phone that can perform only one task intelligently, like problem-solving.
The more data you feed into an AI, the more it learns and the more accurate it is. But how much it learns doesn’t just depend on the amount of data. AI technicians need to make sure that the data is unbiased, accurate, and high quality. It can be said that an AI is only good as the data it is fed, and that’s exactly why AI and blockchain are being used together more and more.
AI and Blockchain Together
If an organization needs to incorporate AI into its business model, they need to do much more than just buy an AI software off the shelf. Once the AI is ready, it requires a large amount of data to be fed into it.
If, for example, a business intends to automate its customer service procedures, the AI needs to be fed past data about client queries, what the most common problems are that most customers face, what was done to solve them, and how each solution satisfied the customer. This kind of information, however, is meant to be confidential, and most businesses would have a major crisis on their hands if any of this data was compromised.
In cases like this, your business should use blockchains to ensure the data being fed into your new AI stays secure.
Advantages of Using AI and Blockchain Together
One of the biggest ethical concerns raised against the use of AI in technology is security concerns regarding user data, and it is used against their will for nefarious purposes.
People are already widely concerned about how their social media usage is monitored, and what information is used by businesses to target them for marketing their products. But one of the bigger concerns is how sensitive user data kept by companies for their machine learning and deep learning algorithms can be compromised.
This data may or may not contain credit card information, bank details, social security numbers, home addresses, and much more.
1. Keeping Customer Data Secure
Using blockchain technology to ensure customer data remains secure will allow industries to further their technology and innovate it in ways they couldn’t before.
Take the example of the healthcare industry. Most patient history is highly confidential, but with the help of blockchains and data encryption, that history and data can be used to train AIs who can diagnose illnesses and infections much more accurately than conventional methods.
Many organizations and industries already put large amounts of effort and money into keeping user data secure, but breaches and data leaks are becoming more and more common these days, not to mention bigger. Blockchain technology provides a simple solution to these problems. With blockchain, all you have to do to ensure data security is to keep your personal key secure, which is just a few kilobytes of data. Without that key, no one else can access those files.
2. AI Manages Blockchain Data Better
If you’re thinking of using blockchain technology to secure user data in the future, you can’t do it without AI at your side. Not efficiently or easily, at least.
Blockchain data is usually encrypted, and to work with it you’ll either have to decrypt it — which opens it up to all kinds of attacks and leaks — or use conventional computers with unusual amounts of processing power.
Bitcoin mining is the prime example of this kind of work, where large computers are used to try and wrangle the beast that is Bitcoin mining. Developers are now aiming to make AI that takes a more logical and sophisticated approach. They hope to make AI that can work with encrypted data itself, and they’re also trying to make AI that takes a more intelligent and logical approach to solving problems, as opposed to a conventional computer trying every possible solution on it until one of them works.
3. Blockchain Understands AI Better
It might be surprising to find out that humans have a hard time understanding how AIs make decisions, given that we made the technology, but the main problem we face is how AIs are capable of considering more data at a time to make a decision than a human brain could possibly contain.
Financial transactions are being verified for authenticity by AI lately, but for a short time, they’ll need to be double-checked by human beings. It would help in that authentication process if humans could understand why the AI made the decision that it did, which is where blockchain comes in.
All the decisions an AI makes can be recorded and stored in blockchain databases, making them secure, easy to access, read and review. In this way, you can make sure that your AI is functioning smoothly and not making the wrong decisions.
How to Apply All This to Your Business
If your business deals with large amounts of user data, securing it with blockchain technology would save you money and effort, effectively bringing down operational costs significantly.
AI technology needs to be fed constant data to keep adapting and improving, which means that if something goes wrong in the training process you can fix it later on. If you record all decisions that your AI performs on a blockchain, you can review it later and decide what kind of data your AI software needs to improve performance, saving you a lot of guesswork and trial and error.
In the future, both these technologies are expected to be used side by side wherever financial transactions are taking place, where sensitive client information is being dealt with, and even to cut costs on keeping sensitive industry data secure. Businesses will be able to foray deeper and more boldly into the kind of data they can use to train machine learning and deep learning algorithms, leveraging them to their advantage so they can reduce operational costs, improve the quality of services provided to customers, and in turn increase revenue exponentially.
Start While You’re Ahead
Blockchain and AI technologies are both ingenious and incredibly promising pieces of technology, revolutionizing multiple industries individually as we speak. But when put together, the possibilities are endless.
You read about Facebook in this article earlier, and how starting while they’re ahead and even coming up with the idea of social media in the first place was how it remains a giant in the space even today. If you take the time out to understand both these technologies yourself or talk to an expert on how you can bring about a digital revolution in your workplace with their help, you too, might be able to be the first one to stumble over something great.
