Top 10 AI Trends for 2020

2020 promises to be a tipping point year for automation benefits and an experimental year for customer or employee experiences. AI is initiating a change in the way both automation and experiences are constituted and delivered. The end result will change the way people interact with technology and organizations. Work and workforces will be changing starting in 2020 and continuing for the next five years. The future looks promising after several years of experimenting with AI.

It's not all fantastic and there will be fakes and failures. In fact, there will be high profile fails, but they are unlikely to cause another AI Winter. Even if the fails can be avoided there are significant challenges with explainability and ethical issues. Guidance will have to be applied with wisdom through goal-driven approaches that have sensible guardrails. It's not a cakewalk, but it will be an emerging careful AI journey for many. Here are my top ten AI trends for 2020

Data Will Continue to Sharpen AI

New data methodologies and algorithmic challenges will be a major factor in getting AI to be more on point in more contexts than ever. The challenges for getting the amount and proper kinds of data to train AI will continue, but organizations will find ways to leverage already synthesized data. They will build on and extend existing data sources while cleaning up some of their own legacy sources. Data will continue to be mined and leveraged with and for AI.

AI Will Shape Customer and Employee Experiences

AI will be leveraged to create the customer and employee experiences of the future. Organizations will morph away or augment chatbots to become real digital assistants. AI will help understand and interpret the real-data based customer and employee journeys. The vision of really helpful customer journeys that span departmental and company boundaries will be turned into a reality with the help of AI. AI will leverage machine learning and deep learning to identify improvement opportunities to act on or consider. Every touchpoint can be gainfully watched and mined.

Full Life Cycle Iteration Will be the Target

Improvement cycles require sensing, orienting, deciding and acting in an interactive or iterative fashion. Pipelines of learning will be funneled into AI discovered opportunities and threats for organizations to consider and eventually anticipate. Workload balances can be influenced by the learnings from AI in a speedy fashion. Iterations of improvements can be watched and compared for even more enhanced learnings.

Sense & Understand Will Progress Quickly

Voice command will be commonplace and combined with more sophisticated Natural Language Processing (NLP). AI will understand and respond more intelligently over time and make some big leaps in 2020. This will improve the lives of individuals in various roles. AI will be baked into chips allowing for the better recognition of objects, objects in motion and objects in context for smarter production lines, cities, and organizational processes.

Conversational "Bot Buddies" Will Emerge

AI will start to tackle harder problems faster than people can. As workers, customers, and people in various roles become comfortable in the reliability of these AI bots, they will become coworkers and even trusted advisors. These trustworthy bots might even become reliable allies for creating desirable outcomes. Visible success stories and examples will start to emerge in 2020.

AI Will Be Integrated in Everything

Not only AI is baked into chips, but it will also be integrated into every software category that exits today. AI will integrate or cooperate with algorithms often, so they will no longer be siloed away from each other. AI will be integrated into platforms to perform security functions and tasks early and often. Many software categories will exhibit ad growing IQs starting in 2020 becoming ubiquitous in five years down the road.

AI Will Be Entering Industry 4.0, Supply and Value Chains

We will see more modern supply and value chains emerge in 2020. AI will help create the ever-elusive management cockpit for organizations or individuals engaged in supply or value chains.  AI will provide valuable insights to ease previously tedious tasks like product redirects. Eventually, AI will help configure and create products dynamically and manage them to completion and eventual destination. 

Smart Super Infrastructures Will Gain Momentum

These Digitial Business Platforms(DBP) can either be business-focused or technically focused, but few are both. These super infrastructures are built to securely combine various aspects of digital business or technology streams. They often include a significant set of AI or analytic feature, they seamlessly integrate multiple data types and speeds, manage work to completion, and support monitoring for improvements. Examples of business DBPs include Salesforce, SAP, and Oracle. Examples of technical DBPs include Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and Google.

AI Will Engender More Predictive Behaviors

As the next decade rolls out, a real-time reaction will not be good enough. Organizations will have to grow to anticipate putting a premium on predictive capabilities and behaviors. AI will participate in monitoring existing channels and integrating the sensing of events and patterns to the predictive models and algorithms. Savvy organizations will have identified key triggers and have responses can be pulled off the shelf. Of course, there are always "black swan: situations, but the combination of AI and algorithms can speed the coping mechanisms for even those situations.

AI Will Supercharge Knowledge Management

AI with the help of NLP and data ontologies, content can be turned into knowledge. This knowledge, in turn, can be leveraged through the presentation at the right time of notifications, advice, videos, and t bot buddies that can interpret conditions to pull the proper knowledge resource.

Net; Net: 

2020 will be a make or break year for AI delivering more automation results. Smarter RPA bots, straight-through processing, and helpful smart assistants will accelerate automation benefits. This will allow organizations to weather any downturn. 2020 is also a year for applying AI to customer and excellence funded by some of the automation benefits that AI brings. Smart organizations will take a portion of the savings and use it as a smart investment fund.