AI in 2019 – key predictions

Throughout 2018, artificial intelligence (AI) has been a hot topic, and no doubt will feature prominently in many 2019 predictions. As we all start to wind up for the year and take a well-deserved break, here are a few thoughts I penned while travelling at 35,000 feet:

• Busting through the hype – as more vendors come to market with AI-enabled products, the hype around AI is set to continue in 2019. While this isn’t much of a surprise, it will continue to create confusion in the marketplace. This, in turn, will encourage business leaders to wise up and become more aware of the potential, applicability, and necessity of leveraging AI to enhance their products and services. AI vendors will also continue to simplify how their AI solutions are configured, hiding implementation complexity, and thus opening their products up to a broader user base.
• The pervasiveness of AI – no longer an option to be simply explored, the need for AI will become inescapable. This will compel organizations to starting asking some big questions, such as how will AI support all the processes we operate, all the services we deliver, and all the products we produce?
• Shortage of AI skills – with the increase of AI-enabled solutions, skills’ shortages will continue to hinder large-scale expansion and deployment of AI solutions throughout the industry. This will be balanced by more industrialized use of machine learning for predictive analytics, which currently represents one of the more well-established domains of AI
• Greater adoption of NLP technology – the inexorable growth in volume of unstructured data will force organizations to explore and adopt natural language processing (NLP) technology to help automate the classification, interpretation, and action on findings.
• The continued rise of chatbots – consumer use of conversational interfaces will continue to grow, as voice and chat-enabled products rapidly becoming the norm. This newer form of human/machine interaction will progressively develop inside the enterprise to augment the actions of knowledge workers. As a consequence, there will be a rise in the use of cognitive knowledge engines that focus on the creation and maintenance of a corporate memory with the objective of providing answers to employees.
• Intelligent automation ecosystems – following the massive adoption of robotic process automation (RPA) by organizations in 2018 – 2019 will see increased levels of intelligence added into base RPA products and through partnerships to create well-defined intelligent automation ecosystems. 2019 will also see the continued augmentation of human intelligence for analytics and decision-making.
• The ethics of AI – with the question of ethics and bias continuing to be a hotly debated topic, AI vendors will need to work on providing visibility of the rationale behind their AI-based decisions and recommendations

AI was omnipresent in 2018, and the hype certainly won’t diminish over the next 12 months. Organizations would do well to embrace the disruption AI will bring and plan for a world in which our machines not only handle our physical work, but also radically augment our capacity to think, problem solve, and make decisions.

To learn more about how RPA and AI are changing the future of work, contact:
lee.beardmore@capgemini.com

Learn more about how Capgemini’s Intelligent Process Automation and the “Five Senses of Intelligent Automation”  are helping leading global brands to transform their business operations through AI and RPA.

Cut through the hype and fog that surrounds AI by reading the 11th edition of Capgemini’s Digital Transformation Review: Artificial Intelligence Decoded, which presents a nuanced perspective on AI.

Lee Beardmore  has spent over two decades advising clients on best strategies for technology adoption. More recently, he has been leading the push in AI and intelligent automation for Capgemini’s Business Services. Lee is a computer scientist by education, a technologist at heart, and has a wealth of cross-industry experience

Lee Beardmore

Expert in Technology Strategy

I have spent over two decades advising clients on best strategies for technology adoption.
I am currently leading the push in AI and intelligent automation for Capgemini’s Business Services.
I am a computer scientist by education, a technologist at heart, and can offer a wealth of cross-industry experience to my clients.