Welcome to the 21st century, the era of Wi-Fi, women empowerment and Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI has long been a fragment of imagination only portrayed in movies and books, hoping to one day become part of the future. Fortunately, the growing global demands and the imperative insistence for a better quality of life have aided in the significant development of AI and machine learning over the last ten years. Companies today, irrespective of scale, have all made machine learning an integral part of their operations, and the results are remarkable, leading not only to higher production and profit but also an undeniably better quality of life.

Machine learning, a division under AI, is the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed. Google, the king of search engines, uses the same in almost every area of expertise. Google uses machine learning to improve the understanding of a user’s query and helps to find the best content. It looks at past query response history to see what has worked for users and what hasn’t and generates more data for query intention by testing different search results. Recently, Google sent shockwaves across the world by launching an upgraded version of the Google Assistant, a high-end AI operating tool that, in every sense, acts like an assistant. From making calendar reminders to actual phone conversations, Google has proved justice to its title, ‘best search engine in the world.’

Another giant in the tech industry, Apple, has been constantly trying to improve its AI platform by incorporating ‘Deep Learning’ with a software called Neural Engine. This is what powers the algorithms that enable face recognition on the iPhone X and transfer your facial expressions into animated emojis. Studio-quality pictures? Amazing portraits? All thanks to another AI-infused trick called ‘Portrait Lighting.’ Walmart, a large chain of American hypermarkets, has proved that even non-tech industries can make optimal utilization of AI, thus paving the way for the next generation of grocery shopping. Aiming to abolish the conventional billing process at stores, Walmart has launched Pick-up Towers that retrieve online orders for customers. Customers can just scan a barcode on their online receipt, and within 45 seconds, the products they purchased will appear on a conveyor belt. Likewise, they have introduced a new retail tech called ‘Scan and Go’ similar to Amazon Go, where customers can use the Walmart app for the checkout process, thus bidding goodbye to the tedious, long wait at the checkout counter. Considering the groundbreaking uses and development of AI across all industries, it’s safe to say that maybe Science fiction movies aren’t science fiction after all.