The combined capabilities of AI and Big Data have become quintessential for business innovation today.

When you work around the idea of the fourth industrial revolution, two technologies that make a quick flash into your brain are – Big Data and Artificial Intelligence. A lot has been said and done in this regard. The combination of both has driven numerous industries towards success. While data or big data is considered the lifeblood of modern businesses, AI on the other hand is the heart to fill life into it.

Speaking more technically, we can say, big data is at the core of every business and the technology to harness its true value, AI is extremely essential to extract true meaning from data.

From Machine Learning to Computer Vision to Natural Language Processing, all AI subsets play a great role in getting something meaningful from just voluminous data.

According to a New Vantage survey report, the percentage of firms investing greater than US$50 million is up to 64.8% in 2020 from just 39.7% in 2018, with a total of 98.8% of firms investing in Big Data and AI initiatives. However, the pace of investment is leveling off, as only 51.9% of firms are accelerating their rate of investment, in stark contrast to the 91.6% who were accelerating their pace of investment in 2019. This includes some of the biggest companies, including Google, JP Morgan Chase, Glaxo Smith Kline, and Bank of America, among others.

The rising stars and the tech giants all have developed mastery at the intersection where big data meets AI.

This convergence of big data and Artificial Intelligence is what the MIT Sloan Management Review called "the single most important development that is shaping the future of how firms drive business value from their data and analytics capabilities." These organizations understand how to combine data-savvy and strong AI capabilities into strongly differentiated solutions with massive market value. Here are a few ways data and AI empower each other:

Big data, the massive data collections that we're all contributing to every day, is only getting bigger. It's estimated that by 2020, every person on earth will generate 1.7 MB of data every second, according to DOMO. Within that data, if we know how to unlock it, lies the potential to build amazing new businesses and solve some of the world's greatest challenges.

Data is the fuel that powers AI, and large data sets make it possible for machine learning applications (machine learning is a branch of AI) to learn independently and rapidly. The abundance of data we collect supplies our AIs with the examples they need to identify differences, increase their pattern recognition capabilities, and see the fine details within the patterns.

AI enables us to make sense of massive data sets, as well as unstructured data that doesn't fit neatly into database rows and columns. AI is helping organizations create new insights from data that was formerly locked away in emails, presentations, videos, and images.

Databases are becoming increasingly versatile and powerful. In addition to traditional relational databases, we now have powerful graph databases that are more capable of connecting data points and uncovering relationships, as well as databases that specialize in document management.

To understand further let's look at some of the most common yet revolutionary applications of AI and Big Data driving business innovation.

Understanding consumer behavior

With so many options on their fingertips, today's consumers are amongst the most fickle that the world of business has ever witnessed. Deep learning, which is a subset of AI, is helping businesses to predict consumer behavior by recognizing voice and search patterns.

Similarly, Big Data, in conjunction with predictive analytics and learning algorithms, come up with offers for customers even before they realize the need for it. A fantastic example of this is Starbucks' personalizing customer experience. Through its app, it uses Big Data and AI to recommend different types of caffeine based on the weather and the customer's location and many other features.

Improving digital marketing trends

Digital marketing is the byword of any company worth its salt. Along the same lines are SEO, generating leads, and conversion. Big Data and AI work in combination to provide better insights to companies and narrow down on the targeted consumers who are critical to digital marketing.

By making use of the latest analytic tools, businesses are also able to save a lot of money and have better conversions. Netflix, the live streaming giant, incorporates AI into its digital marketing, which has exponentially raised their subscriptions. This directly translates to increased revenue.

Driving virtual assistants

Not many of us can imagine starting the day without the help of virtual assistants or VAs. The most notable VAs are Siri and Alexa. The same is true for many businesses all around the globe. AI has helped decipher or at least make sense of Big Data, which makes the VAs more intelligent.

The reaches of Big Data and AI are seen in self-driving cars that drive on auto-pilot. Among them is the Tesla. But of course, it is no secret as the company's CEO has been openly propagating the immense ways in which Artificial intelligence will change the very course of history.