"Artificial Intelligence (AI) will further stretch and strengthen the world of business. It will affect all industries for sure. But it does not mean all human jobs will be replaced by AI. Rather, it will be helpful to expanding our expertise in work,” said Gary Schneider, Vice President of Global Technical Sales, IBM, who delivered a keynote speech at Think Korea held at Grand Hyatt Hotel in Seoul on Tuesday.

Think Korea presented by IBM and Maeil Business Newspaper is a dedicated forum for business leaders and this year’s theme was AI and its applications in business. Schneider was a featured keynote speaker along with Marie Wieck, General Manager of IBM Blockchain.

AI systems currently available stand between Narrow AI and General AI. It is called Broad AI, a more advanced one beyond a limited scope of tasks but still away from the human-like robots in sci-fi stories.

Schneider introduced various cases of AI applications in finance, logistics, healthcare and clothing during his lecture.

"AI can be used to measure a credit level of a customer who has no credit history. The customer’s credit risk can be assessed based on lifestyle data such as cell phone usage, transaction history, and the use of social media,” he said. Regarding the AI application in the area of e-commerce logistics, Schneider said that AI can help optimize a level of inventories between shops, for example, by locating a shop with the best chance of resale in the near future when deciding where to send a returned item.”

"With AI, we are also able to raise the quality of treatment by extracting and presenting only important images out of about 3,000 MRI images to the radiologist, and we can also provide information of frequently-changing regulations in the form of natural language Q&A,” he explained.

“AI and block-chain revolutions are hitting us like a huge tsunami which will shake up the global economy, and this tsunami will offer opportunities for the well-prepared only,” Maekyung Media Group Chairman Chang Dae-whan said in his congratulatory message.

By Seo Dong-cheol and Minu Kim

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