The latest market analysis by digital identity specialists, ID Crypt Global, reveals that the global Artificial Intelligence (AI) market is set to grow by almost 40% in 2023.
And as industries from real estate to medicine discover powerful new applications for the world’s most hotly debated area of innovation, a quiet revolution is happening in the world of identity verification.
In 2021, the global AI market was worth an estimated £44.3bn. In 2022, this increased by 56.7%, reaching a total of £69.4bn.
This year, as our knowledge increases and sentiment improves towards the extraordinary potential of AI, the global market is expected to increase by a further 39.3%, hitting a total value of £96.7bn.
This trend of rapid growth is expected to continue year-on-year so that, in 2025, the AI market will be worth £180.3bn.
In the UK, total AI expenditure in 2020 (latest available data) was £62.8bn. And while one of the biggest concerns about the rise of AI is that it will end up making humans obsolete, the figures actually show that it is creating more opportunities, with the human labour requirements of developing, operating, and maintaining AI accounting for £46bn of this total spend.
So far, the UK’s biggest AI expenditure has come from the Manufacturing sector, where the total spend is £9.6bn, or 15.3% of the national total.
With a spend of £6.4bn, IT and Telecoms ranks second in the UK and accounts for 10.2% of the nation’s total investment, followed by Hospitality & Leisure (£6.1bn), Retail (£5.3), and Finance & Accounting (£4bn).
Significant AI investment has also started coming from all kinds of industry, from Construction (£3.7bn) to Medicine & Health Services (£3.2bn), and Real Estate (£1.4bn) to Legal (£1.2bn).
How is AI cracking down on ID fraud today?
One specific area of innovation that is helping to drive AI investment across the board is the technology’s ability to significantly increase the ease and efficiency of identity verification.
On the most basic level, AI is being applied by sectors such as retail and hospitality to help check ID for age-restricted goods, but it’s also increasingly being used by other sectors such as Real Estate, Healthcare, and lLegal Services to ensure that people are indeed who they say they are. With such application, AI is making a huge difference in the fight against serious crimes such as identity fraud and money laundering.
Even though the technology is in its infancy, AI already has extraordinary powers to aid ID verification.
For example, AI can now use machine learning and biometric authentication to verify identity with absolute accuracy without the need for human input. Most importantly, these data-driven safety protocols cannot be manipulated or fooled by criminals and fraudsters.
The genius of AI in ID verification doesn’t stop there. The technology can, for example, use keystroke dynamics to recognise a person from their typing patterns. An individual’s typing patterns, such as speed and dwell time (time taken between individual keystrokes) are, in has been discovered, as unique as fingerprints. Thanks to AI, we now have the ability to recognise these patterns.
Face and voice recognition are equally powerful tools that are seeing increased application everywhere from airports to online banking, and AI has even advanced far enough to execute document verification which checks whether digital documents and online forms are genuine or have been faked or doctored by fraudsters who are trying to fool authorities.
Of course, with any emerging technology, AI also poses problems as well as solutions with regard to ID verification. The technology can be manipulated by fraudsters and is responsible for many deep fakes which can make it significantly harder to authenticate and verify if a user is real and if their ID is, in fact, legitimate. How this problem is rectified is a primary focus of the sector going forward.
CEO and Founder of ID Crypt Global, Lauren Wilson-Smith said, “AI is an innovation that has such incredible potential to change the world we live in that it instils as much fear as it does optimism. We’ve seen similar reactions in the face of social media, driverless cars, and so on. It seems the greater the potential for impact, the more we are drawn to contemplate the worst case scenario. With AI, this fear ranges from human obsolescence in the workplace, to the rise of killer robots.
“But while it’s important to keep a close eye on how a technology is evolving and the potential implications that will have, we also need to celebrate the brilliant, often low profile, improvements it is already facilitating in business and society.
“ID verification is one of these brilliant improvements. Fraud and ID theft are blights on society which have, in the past, been difficult and time consuming to thwart. Today, however, professionals from estate agents to hospital administrators can be confident that their AI verification solutions are working behind the scenes.
Of course, as with any advancements in technology, the use of AI within ID verification has endured its teething problems and so we can’t be solely reliant on it. But as the technology is more widely adopted and improved, we are confident that such crimes will become a thing of the past.”
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