Hello all,
AI, along with a host of other technologies, is mitigating some of the pandemic’s negative consequences both in healthcare and business in general.
The most obvious area of AI application is in healthcare. Hospitals and public health agencies are spearheading efforts against the spread of the virus. Investment in AI-based healthcare solutions has doubled from about US2 billion globally as a result of the pandemic. We expect it to continue growing at more than 30% for several years to come. AI can help detect the virus; for example, AI-enabled thermal cameras reduce the reliance of frontline staff to manually measure individuals' temperatures using forehead thermometers. This increases the accuracy of readings, takes less time to measure temperatures, and reduces the risk of frontline staff contracting the virus.
Frontline medical services have been severely stretched across the world. Technologies like AI-enabled chatbots, telemedicine, drones, and physical robots have been used to reduce interaction between patients and doctors and cut the risk of infection for medical staff. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States built a chatbot to respond to people who potentially have COVID-19 symptoms. In addition, the US has also put up an online triage system to respond to individuals with more serious symptoms, so that the authorities can locate them earlier.
In Singapore, medics at the National University Hospital use a clinical chat assistant smartphone app to keep pace with the fast-changing information about the pandemic. AI in hospitals goes beyond providing insights. Should healthcare services be further overwhelmed, AI can help by optimizing patient management and operations to reduce the workload on healthcare staff. Also in Singapore, AI provides real-time visibility of ground operations at Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH) from admission to discharge, including keeping track of resources, such as hospital workers, beds, critical equipment, personal protective gear, and other supplies. AI is even used to predict operational problems before they occur, outputting information on how resources can be better allocated. In February 2020, TTSH saw a surge in attendance at its COVID-19 screening center, coinciding with increased inpatient admissions at the National Centre for Infectious Diseases (NCID), which is located next to TTSH. Guided by its internal AI tools, TTSH was able to pull together the manpower, equipment, and other resources to quickly open five wards at the NCID and strengthen its screening center.
AI-based tracking, combined with advanced graphical analytics, can help predict the spread of the virus, require local lockdowns, and give authorities the information they need to prevent the virus from spreading further. By tracking movement through mobile devices, AI can give scientists prior warning and provide countries and hospitals advance notice of potential virus risks.
AI is accelerating the process of diagnosis, vaccine creation, and testing, helping to identify genome sequences to build an effective vaccine.
Traditional manual tests are extremely slow by comparison. BenevolentAI from the UK used its AI drug discovery platform to identify approved drugs to potentially inhibit the progression of COVID-19. It used AI to derive contextual relationships between genes, diseases, and drugs, suggesting a number of possible vaccines. In just days, BenevolentAI found a vaccine candidate in latestage clinical trials in the US. AI enables the testing of a potential vaccine within months instead of years, as was the case with the SARS epidemic. That said, testing a potential vaccine on animals and then people is a very slow process that requires careful design and is by no means certain of success. For example, fearing a pandemic, a vaccine was rushed out for the 1976 swine flu, exposing millions of people to an increased risk of the neurological disorder Guillain-Barre syndrome. The best strategy therefore is coordination across national research and development (R&D) efforts to find a cure. Again, AI, particularly in the form of natural language processing (NLP), is being used to track scientific papers and identify potential directions for new research on the virus.
Many enterprises and industries, such as transport, logistics, agriculture, and communications, are adopting AI to help them scale and operate effectively to meet the fast-changing needs of their customers and employees while social distancing and quarantine measures remain in place. With the COVID-19 crisis continuing for the foreseeable future, more companies are moving beyond crisis management and towards business resilience and growth.
Many speculate what the new normal will look like, but it is almost certain that businesses will ensure they are able to operate and interact with their customers digitally. As such, AI is increasing in prominence as a way for enterprises to adapt to the increased use of digital platforms while increasing productivity and efficiency. Use cases involving AI chatbots, intelligent automation, voice analytics, and AI cybersecurity tools, have all increased despite the general economic slowdown brought about by the pandemic.
With the COVID-19 pandemic, AI has proven itself to be a valuable tool in making economies, industries, societies, and individuals more resilient to similar threats. The debate is no longer AI versus people; the new challenge will be how to use AI to improve knowledge workers' productivity. By 2024, we expect more than a third of knowledge workers to spend a significant time at work interacting with AI-based tools.
Thank you.
