The impact of AI on various business units throughout an organization spans from finance and marketing to HR and customer service — and certainly doesn’t stop when it comes to the research and development (R&D) arm.

   Not only does AI promise to improve existing goods, services, and organizational operations and efficiency, but it will play an important role when it comes to shaping the future of innovation and R&D. Just as the computer revolution brought about significant reductions in the costs associated with manual calculations and the rise of the internet transformed the way we access information, AI — while still nascent in the enterprise — can help organizations reduce costs and simultaneously tap into new business opportunities. Machine learning algorithms play a key role in research problems that require classification and prediction through their ability to aid in cost optimization and improve performance across R&D projects where these tasks pose roadblocks. A lot of innovation and R&D involves making predictions based on data and, with machine learning, these predictions can be done in a faster and less costly way.