Artificial Intelligence: Expansion, Adoption and the Value for Business Intelligence
According to Mark Cuban, “The world’s first trillionaires are going to come from somebody who masters AI.” And as we continue to encounter stories and predictions about AI, we’re seeing how it will fundamentally change a variety of industries on an almost day-to-day basis. The challenge, however, lies in effectively explaining what this type of technology can do to improve job functions. The lack of articulating the concept of AI (in this case) is typical of any hype cycle; but, the truth is that implementing systems to make dynamic and complex decisions as a way to displace humans is way off from mainstream adoption.
As we move further into 2017, we will start to see the hype die down and broader adoption of AI-based solutions within organizations — particularly in data analysis and deriving insight from that data. Here are some of the trends we’ll start to see in the coming months:
The expansion of AI. We’ve seen and heard a lot of speculation about the industries that will benefit the most from AI, and we’ll continue to see improvements as more and more companies adopt the technology and more of the workforce interacts with AI-based solutions. Going far beyond the basic keyword search functions most people are familiar with, AI can be taught the nature of words and sentences and string together concepts and gists within the text. It will then present the information to business users, not just highly trained data scientists, in a format suitable for them to understand. In understanding the contents of extremely large numbers of documents, AI can take a huge workload off human reviewers and help them do their jobs faster and more efficiently.
M&A activity will rebound with a record year. Last year was a disappointing year for mergers and acquisitions. Between the broken deals with Allergan and Pfizer, Halliburton and Baker Hughes, and many more, investors and companies alike were starting to panic about the future of the economy. This year, things will quickly change and we’ll be on the rebound with a record M&A year.
