Benefits of AI & Blockchain Technology Together

Few technologies have enraptured as large a global audience as artificial intelligence and blockchain have. These two exciting developments have beset our market with countless disruptions, with companies and aspiring entrepreneurs everywhere scrambling to understand them in order to remain competitive. Too little attention has been paid to the ambitious ways that AI and blockchain technology can be mixed together, however, despite the immense benefits that can be derived from such collaboration.

Here are some of the many benefits of AI & blockchain technology together, and how some companies are pioneering the dual-development of these exciting innovations.

We're entering a new era of cryptography

One of the most interesting things about AI and blockchain technology is that they're both ripe for reshaping cryptography as we understand it today. Blockchain is famously secure, with the decentralized ledger technology effectively acting as the new digital filing system of the 21st century economy. What few business professionals realize is that blockchain is only just the start, as applying machine learning techniques to blockchain can take modern cryptography and supercharge it. Some are actually beginning to muse that AI could be the future of privacy, with complicated machine learning algorithms working with encrypted data in a way that humans never could.

This is particularly important because of the political and economic moment we find ourselves in. With data breaches and scandalous hacking efforts regularly grabbing international headlines, consumers around the world are more worried than ever before about their digital privacy. Modern lifestyles heavily revolve around social media and digital platforms, with many people keeping sensitive information on their devices or on the cloud via these accounts. In the future, machine learning techniques could very well be the only thing keeping your privacy intact from corporations, governments, and hackers that are trying to make off with your sensitive data.

Privacy isn't the only area where AI and blockchain work well together, either. In a number of commercial and industrial areas, for instance, AI and blockchain can be combined to cut the costs of doing business and achieve goals quicker than ever before.

AI & Blockchain will change the supply chain

IBM has made it quite clear that the modern supply chain is ripe for disruption, with emerging technologies like AI, blockchain, and the IoT appearing to be particularly promising in this regard. The company has already released research demonstrating how AI and blockchain can be merged to radically upend modern supply chains in order to make them more efficient and less expensive to operate.

As IBM notes, AI will soon be used to manage inventory, especially since modern supply chains are becoming so complex they require that humans work alongside of machines in order to understand them. IBM claims that its leveraging of AI has helped make its logistics operations more accurate than ever before, and the company also persuasively argues that blockchain has a role to play in the disruption of the supply chain, too. IBM's Supply Chain Business Network (SCBN) is a useful example of how companies in the future will use blockchain-powered services to secure their supply chain and eliminate friction in the delivery and affirmation process.

Cryptocurrencies will never be the same

AI and blockchain are also reshaping the modern marketplace by making cryptocurrency trading more exciting than ever before. Currently, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin are mostly traded by human investors across coin exchanges. Very soon, however, automated processes could be leveraging the power of algorithms in order to trade cryptocurrencies at a frantic pace that far exceeds anything a human can grapple with. A number of trends continue to indicate that AI is key to the future of cryptocurrency trading, which will help AI-based startups grow familiar with the blockchain technology that virtually all digital tokens are based off of.  

Finally, despite the immense impact AI and blockchain can have on certain niche industries, they're also set to generate seismic changes in a general fashion. Data analytics operations, for instance, can be useful in almost any industry. They're also set to be upended by the introduction of better AI and blockchain services into the market, as many in the medical field can tell you. Already, hospitals, healthcare providers, and other firms grappling with sensitive patient data are combining AI and blockchain to fuel a new era of healthcare analytics which could save lives.

There are few industries that won't be upended by the way that AI and blockchain come together to change analytics. In this day and age, seemingly every company needs a robust data analytics operation to succeed, with consumers everywhere having their data vacuumed up at a record pace. Blockchain technology will be needed to secure that data, and complex AI programs will be needed to make sense of it as the pile of information grows ever-larger. One thing's for sure - AI and blockchain, powerful by themselves, are fundamental game-changers once combined together.