Cognitive Computing is used in almost every field, we will discuss a few of them here :
Retail Industry : Cognitive Computing in the Retail industry has very interesting applications. It helps the marketing team to collect more data and then analyse to make retailers more efficient and adaptive. These help companies to make more sales and provide personalized suggestions to the customers. E-commerce sites have integrated cognitive computing very well, they collect some basic information from the customers about the basic details of the product they are looking for and then analyse the large available data and recommend the products to the customer. Cognitive computing has brought numerous advancements to the industry. Through demand forecasting, price optimization, and website design, cognitive computing has provided retailers with the tools to build more agile businesses.
Apart from e-commerce sites, cognition can be very useful for on-floor shopping as well. It will help retailers to provide customers personalized products – what they want, when they want, and how they want to derive meaningful experiences, opportunities to reduce the wastage and losses by providing the fresh products by predicting the demand priorly, and by automating areas it will reduce the cycle time, effort and improve the efficiency.
Logistics : Cognition is the new frontier in the Transportation, Logistics, and Supply chain. It helps at every stage of logistics, like Designing Decisions in Warehouse, Warehouse Management, Warehouse Automation, IoT, and Networking. In the warehousing process, cognition helps in compiling storage code, automatic picking with the automated guided vehicle, and use of warehouse robots will help to improve work efficiency. Logistics distribution links use cognition to plan the best path improving the recognition rate which will save a lot of labour. IoT will help in warehouse infrastructure management, optimizing inventory, enhancing operations in the warehouse and the autonomous guided vehicle can be used for picking and putting operations. Apart from IoT, the other important technology is Wearable Devices, which helps to convert all the objects to sensors and augments human decision-making and warehouse operations. These devices have evolved from smartwatches to smart clothes, smart glasses, computing devices, exoskeletons, ring scanners, and voice recognition.
Banking and Finance : Cognition in the banking industry will help to improve operational efficiency, customer engagement, and experience and grow revenues. Cognitive banking will completely reshape the banking and financial institutions on three dimensions: Deeper contextual engagement, New analytics insights, and Enterprise transformation. We are already experiencing examples of such transformation for tasks like performing various banking transactions digitally, opening a new retail account, processing claims and loans in minutes. This technology has proved to be very helpful in the areas of product management and customer service support.
Cognitive banking will provide customized support to the customers, it will help in deciding personalized investment plans based on the customer being risk-averse or risk-taker. Also, it will provide personalized engagement between the financial institution and the customer by dealing in the individual fashion with each customer and focusing on their requirements. Here, the computer will intelligently understand the personality of the customer based on the other content available online authored by the customer.
Power and Energy : ‘Smart Power’ is the new intelligent future. The oil and gas industry faces huge cost pressure to find, produce and distribute crude oil and its byproducts. Also, they face a shortage of skilled engineers and technical professionals. Energy firms take various critical decisions where huge capital is involved, like which site to explore, allocation of resources, and quantity of production. For a long time, this decision was taken based on the data collected and stored and the expertise and intuition of the project team.
With cognitive computing, technologies process volumetric data to support decisions and learn from those results. This technology will help us to make various important decisions of the future like commercially viable oil wells, ways to make existing power stations more efficient, and will also give a competitive advantage to existing power companies.
Cyber Security : Cognitive Algorithms provides end-to-end security platforms and detects, assesses, researches, and remediate the threats. It will help to prevent cyber Attacks (or cognitive hacking), this will make customers less vulnerable to manipulation as well as provide a technical solution to detect any misleading data and disinformation.
With the increase in volumetric data, and rise in cyber attacks, and the shortage of skilled cybersecurity experts we need modern methods like cognitive computing to deal with these cyber threats. Major security players in the industry have already introduced cognitive-based services for cyber threats detection and security analytics. Such cognitive systems not only detect threats but also assess systems and scan for vulnerabilities in the system and propose actions.
The other side of the coin is that for cognitive computing we need huge volumetric data, now securing the privacy of the data is also of utmost importance. To take full advantage of cognitive computing we need to build a large database of information, and at the same time also maintain its confidentiality and prevent data leakage.
Healthcare : We have already briefly discussed the application of Cognitive Computing in healthcare. Recent advancement in cognitive computing has helped medical professionals to make better treatment decisions and improves the efficiency of the Medical professionals and also improves the outcomes of the patients. It is a self-learning algorithm that uses Machine learning algorithms, data mining techniques, visual recognition, and natural language processing, dependent on real-time patient information, medical transcripts, and other data. The system processes an enormous amount of data instantly to answer specific questions and make intelligent recommendations. Cognitive computing in healthcare links the functioning of humans and machines where computers and the human brain truly overlap to improve human decision-making. This will empower doctors and other medical professionals to better diagnose and treat their patients and above all helps in planning customized treatment modules. For example, Genome Medicine is one such area that has evolved by cognitive computing.
Education : Cognitive computing is going to change how the education industry has been working. It has already started bringing a few of the changes. It will change how the schools, colleges, and universities have been functioning, and it will help to provide personalized study material to students. Can you even imagine how fast a cognitive system can search the library or the journals and research papers from a digital library?
A cognitive assistant can provide personal tutorials to students, guide them through the coursework, and can also help students to understand certain critical concepts at their own pace. It can also guide students in selecting the courses depending upon their interest. It can act as a career counsellor.
