Industry Leaders Make 2020 AI Predictions

2020 looks to be a pivotal year for the technology industry, with many of the ‘next-gen’ products and infrastructure improvements expected to make the big leap into the mainstream.

According to many industry analysts and leaders, a lot will happen in machine learning and artificial intelligence in the next 12 months. The industry is already booming but is still rather unstructured. We may see better frameworks and solutions come from companies, as it matures.

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Machine learning will also be probed further by businesses, but there may be fewer shots in the dark, according to Fractal Analytics managing partner, Eugene Roytburg: “Machine learning will be more clearly defined as a part of broader analytics and will have better-defined application areas and value creation.

“While the companies pushed for many ML tests and use-cases mostly driven by ‘artificial’ pressure, the ‘traditional’ analytics development took a back seat,” he added. 2020, he believes, will be the year businesses start to better evaluate what is needed.  

APAC CPO Sandeep Dutta has similar thoughts: “2019 saw a clear shift in enterprise resources towards getting the data strategy right before launching large AI projects. Many companies focused on creating enterprise data lakes on the cloud that can help get reliable quality data sets in place. We are expecting to see this trend accentuate in 2020, with many centralized analytics CoEs first focusing on getting the data right.”

In order to improve AI integration, Dutta said businesses need to incorporate design thinking. This sentiment is mirrored by Eugenie.ai CEO Soudip Roy Chowdhary, who said: “Design continues to play an important role in ensuring wide adoption of AI. 2020 is going to see a new era of the human-machine confluence with further progress in the areas of deep learning, especially in reinforcement learning and generic adversarial network.”

As AI projects become more sophisticated, so too does the hardware behind them. Special-purpose AI processors, GPUs, and other chips are becoming more commonplace. Fractal VP Suraj Amonkar said these chips will allow for “tighter integration on the system” and “open vast possibilities to the amount of processing power that AI algorithms can leverage.”

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Conversica CEO Jim Kaskade doesn’t have a positive outlook for the year ahead, predicting the U.S. will be in the midst of a recession, but AI may help businesses through it: “AI can significantly soften the blow by matching the right consumer with the right business person for a useful pre or post-sales conversation. For businesses that have significantly invested in digital, AI is a must to help you become recession-resistant.”

Another way to bolster business, according to Cybera executive VP Jeff Manning, is to ‘uberize’. He said: “In 2020, the most successful businesses will harness smart technologies to enhance the customer journey and CX in four key areas: closer and stronger customer engagement; an expansion of payment options; optimizing their supply chain and logistics strategies; and optimizing business processes through technologies like IoT.”