In just the past year, more than half of adults have used AI-powered tools, sometimes without even realizing it.

Studies show AI could impact up to 40% of jobs worldwide while also creating entirely new industries we're only beginning to imagine.

From unlocking your phone with Face ID to predicting the words you'll type next or offering you streaming suggestions, AI uses data to think and learn like humans.

"Carolina Impact"'s Jason Terzis joins us with a look at how some area businesses are putting AI to work.

- Well, artificial intelligence is certainly transforming the world in a variety of ways by automating tasks, enabling advanced diagnostics, and creating sophisticated decision-making technology.

I had the chance to visit with three different organizations from various sectors: education, energy, and fintech, to learn a little more about how AI is changing what we do and how we do it.

(energetic music) It's a fast-changing world, and perhaps nothing in it is changing faster than artificial intelligence.

- Technology grows more sophisticated, so does the potential for deception.

- [Jason] And with all those changes comes the good and the not so good.

- I am not Morgan Freeman, and what you see is not real.

- There's a whole new wave of AI technology called deepfakes, digitally manipulated content.

- I'm sure everybody has seen a lot of the Gen AI stuff that's out there where you can basically, through Gen AI, make people say or do things that they didn't say or do.

- [Jason] While fun for social media videos... - What's up, TikTok?

- [Jason] It's a new gateway for criminals.

- A finance worker in Hong Kong got scammed into paying a whopping $25 million to scammers who used deepfake technology to successfully pose as a company executive during an entire Zoom meeting.

- [Jason] Stephanie Schuckers heads up UNC Charlotte's Center for Identification Technology Research and is co-director of the university's Artificial Intelligence Institute.

- So we're a National Science Foundation center.

Our focus is on identity and biometrics, kind of like fingerprint, face recognition, but how that gets embedded into an overall identity system.

(lively music) We need to be an attacker to understand what attackers might do.

- [Jason] Stephanie leads a team of local and international tech wizards in trying to beat the bad guys at their own game.

- It could look like you who is logging into that bank account.

It could look like you who's on that Zoom call.

And so what we want to do is we want to harden those systems, and we can do that through something called liveness.

- [Jason] Liveness is part of an intricate algorithm that helps distinguish a living person from a fake.

Using 3D printers, Stephanie's team creates lifelike masks to see what can fake out a facial recognition system.

- And so what our work is, is to try to prevent people from doing that.

So we're building security systems to prevent them attacking with things like masks or even simple things like photographs.

- [Jason] By conducting their own mock attacks, they can help determine how to prevent those same attacks from happening in the real world.

- We can do all kinds of measurements in hardware to make sure it's a real person, and we can add randomness into those measurements to make sure that somebody can't duplicate it, even if they could figure out the hardware side.

- [Jason] But of course, not all artificial intelligence is being used for crime or preventing it.

A lot of it is helping businesses become more efficient in day-to-day operations.

- We've seen what's possible with AI.

- [Jason] AvidXchange is a financial technology, or a fintech company.

Its primary focus is to help businesses eliminate the manual and time-consuming tasks of processing invoices, approvals, and payments, as it says right on their elevators: transforming the way businesses pay and receive bills.

- Last year, three innovations that we launched for our customers.

- [Jason] Emily Dalton serves as vice president of product, helping AvidXchange create and implement multiple AI technologies.

- The first is what we call AI invoice exception reduction.

Now with AI, as the customer makes a correction, the AI is automatically learning, and then the next time that invoice comes in, it's gonna automatically apply that learning and speed up and automate that invoice through the system.

And the second innovation that we launched is AI PO line item matching.

So that's gonna be taking the purchase order line items and using AI to automatically match and reconcile those, making sure that what they purchased is matching what they're paying.

And then the third innovation that we launched is an AI approval agent helping those AP teams move those invoices through to payment as quickly as possible.

- [Jason] Omnivise is a portfolio of digital solutions and software developed by Siemens Energy to optimize, monitor, and control power generation assets, including gas turbines, renewable energy systems, and hybrid power plants.

- We started investing heavily in this, you know, quite a few years ago, and we were working with customers, some of whom were using spreadsheets to manage this process.

- [Jason] It's all part of a comprehensive AI-driven platform for predictive maintenance and asset management with the goals of maximizing performance, reducing costs, and preparing for the future of autonomous energy operations.

- So in Omnivise, we're creating software that helps all of these assets, this equipment, operate its most efficient way.

And that might mean I wanna be able to predict like how much sun will shine or how much cloud cover there will be on a given day because I know that that's going to affect when I need to turn on my power plant much more.

Using AI, I can predict exactly what those times are that I should be really turning things on and off in the energy system that I'm managing.

- [Jason] From weather forecasting and predictive maintenance at power plants to streamlining invoicing with accuracy and time-saving measures at businesses and finding ways to stay one step ahead of would-be criminals with deepfakes and facial recognition, there's a plethora of strategic planning and risk management happening in regards to artificial intelligence and its impact on business and society worldwide.

- We've worked hard to embrace AI here at the station because we're a small team and it can help us do more faster, but I often ask myself, what's next with it?

What do you think?

- Yeah, from our perspective, where it's able to create video sometimes, where we, you know, especially if you want something a long, long time ago and video doesn't exist, you can kind of create it.

It is the wild west of sorts.

China currently operates the world's largest and most advanced surveillance system, constantly tracking its 1.4 billion citizens.

Stephanie Schuckers, the professor from UNCC who we spoke with in that story, was recently in Washington, D.C., talking with government staffers about possible legal frameworks and guidelines for some of this technology.

Safety is obviously important, but you're also dealing with privacy issues and that sort of thing.

So, you know, it's one of these: where do you walk the line on what's safety, what's necessary, what's an invasion of people's privacy?

But so many different factors with AI.

- Never-never-ending.

Thanks for enlightening us a little.

- You're welcome.

- Appreciate it.