Infographic: How artificial intelligence will reinvent the workplace

Back in the 1930s, the science fiction writer Isaac Asimov wrote a famous collection of stories called I, Robot, which described a world in which the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) saw robots and humans work side by side. Nearly 90 years later, Asimov’s vision looks less like make believe and more like a not-too-distant reality.

However, the fear that robots will replace humans in the workplace can prevent us from unlocking the transformative potential of AI or its ability to revolutionise the way we work. In particular, technologies that deploy AI – such as IBM’s Watson supercomputer – have a natural affinity with complex Big Data applications.

The 2015 State of Artificial Intelligence and Big Data, a recent report by software provider and natural language generation specialist Narrative Science, offers compelling insights into the growing relationship between Big Data and the field of robotics while debunking the idea that artificial intelligence and human workers are diametrically opposed. The study, which took in the views of employees, executive leaders, managers and data scientists and is also the basis for today’s fascinating infographic, found that 80% of respondents believe that AI-powered technologies can multiply jobs and bolster worker performance and efficiency and that 29% believed that predictive analytics was the most important potential application for AI-powered technology.