AI Across Industries and the Importance of Responsible AI

AI is reshaping industries at a rapid pace, but as its influence grows, so do the ethical concerns that come with it. This episode examines how AI is being applied across sectors such as healthcare, finance, and retail, while also exploring the crucial issue of ensuring that these technologies align with human values. In this conversation, Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham are joined by Hemant Gahankari, Senior Principal OCI Instructor, who emphasizes the importance of fairness, inclusivity, transparency, and accountability in AI systems. AI for You: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/ai-for-you/152601/ Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, David Wright, Kris-Ann Nansen, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode. ---------------------------------------------------- Episode Transcript: 00:00 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we’ll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let’s get started! 00:25 Lois: Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I’m Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services. Nikita: Hey everyone! In our last episode, we spoke about how Oracle integrates AI capabilities into its Fusion Applications to enhance business workflows, and we focused on Predictive, Generative, and Agentic AI. Lois: Today, we’ll discuss the various applications of AI. This is the final episode in our AI series, and before we close, we’ll also touch upon ethical and responsible AI. 01:01 Nikita: Taking us through all of this is Senior Principal OCI Instructor Hemant Gahankari. Hi Hemant! AI is pretty much everywhere today. So, can you explain how it is being used in industries like retail, hospitality, health care, and so on? Hemant: AI isn't just for sci-fi movies anymore. It's helping doctors spot diseases earlier and even discover new drugs faster. Imagine an AI that can look at an X-ray and say, hey, there is something sketchy here before a human even notices. Wild, right? Banks and fintech companies are all over AI. Fraud detection. AI has got it covered. Those robo advisors managing your investments? That's AI too. Ever noticed how e-commerce companies always seem to know what you want? That's AI studying your habits and nudging you towards that next purchase or binge watch. Factories are getting smarter. AI predicts when machines will fail so they can fix them before everything grinds to a halt. Less downtime, more efficiency. Everyone wins. Farming has gone high tech. Drones and AI analyze crops, optimize water use, and even help with harvesting. Self-driving cars get all the hype, but even your everyday GPS uses AI to dodge traffic jams. And if AI can save me from sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic, I'm all for it. 02:40 Nikita: Agreed! Thanks for that overview, but let’s get into specific scenarios within each industry. Hemant: Let us take a scenario in the retail industry-- a retail clothing line with dozens of brick-and-mortar stores. Maintaining proper inventory levels in stores and regional warehouses is critical for retailers. In this low-margin business, being out of a popular product is especially challenging during sales and promotions. Managers want to delight shoppers and increase sales but without overbuying. That's where AI steps in. The retailer has multiple information sources, ranging from point-of-sale terminals to warehouse inventory systems. This data can be used to train a forecasting model that can make predictions, such as demand increase due to a holiday or planned marketing promotion, and determine the time required to acquire and distribute the extra inventory. Most ERP-based forecasting systems can produce sophisticated reports. A generative AI report writer goes further, creating custom plain-language summaries of these reports tailored for each store, instructing managers about how to maximize sales of well-stocked items while mitigating possible shortages. 04:11 Lois: Ok. How is AI being used in the hospitality sector, Hemant? Hemant: Let us take an example of a hotel chain that depends on positive ratings on social media and review websites. One common challenge they face is keeping track of online reviews, leading to missed opportunities to engage unhappy customers complaining on social media. Hotel managers don't know what's being said fast enough to address problems in real-time. Here, AI can be used to create a large data set from the tens of thousands of previously published online reviews. A textual language AI system can perform a sentiment analysis across the data to determine a baseline that can be periodically ...