Artificial intelligence systems have been around since the 1950s, and yet the concept still scares workers and company executives alike, but Canadian neuroscientist Blake Richards says companies are going to have to start working with the technology and think bigger than just simply replacing workers with machines.

In studying how brain functions can inform AI and machine learning algorithms and, conversely, how the technology can help us understand our brains better, his research is contributing to the development of more advanced AI systems.

Here, the associate professor at the School of Computer Science and the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University, and a core faculty member at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA) in Montreal, a world-renowned research institute in AI and machine learning, shares his insights on current and future technology applications and where business leaders should be concentrating their own brain power these days.

FP: Where is AI deployed prominently now and what applications can we expect in the near future?

Blake Richards: We've seen a real growth of AI assistants to do administrative tasks -- i.e, kick-start writing, summarize meeting notes and collect information from documents -- which is adding to the existing uses of AI in a number of domains. The tech companies, for example, have been using AI for decades and platforms like Facebook wouldn't work without it. In less than five years, I see some people having an AI assistant helping them regularly.

The financial sector is already using AI for data analytics, but there are huge opportunities for analytics in other domains, namely consumer behaviour. Right now, we're doing market research based on traditional focus groups, questionnaires and polls, where data is collected and analyzed. But as we've seen on social media, you can track behaviour in a more subtle, fine-grained way and AI systems could give us more accurate insights into how consumers choose one product or one brand over another.

The other big one is health care. With better analytical techniques, there is huge potential in detecting and better understanding the nature of various diseases and disorders so we can treat them appropriately.

FP: What about longer-term applications?

BR: It's akin to the invention of the steam engine in the dawn of the industrial revolution. If you really have a system that can replicate human cognition, there is no way to actually enumerate the list of potential applications. There are the possible ones like driving a car or running a factory, but then additional applications that we can't imagine yet because seeing those opportunities will require first seeing how the economy evolves to take advantage of AI.