Thinkers360 2020 Predictions are member-sourced predictions from our opt-in B2B thought leader and influencer community with 15M+ followers on social media combined. The 2020 Predictions for AI are part of a series intended to provide actionable insights for business and technology executives.
Having recently published our Top 20 Global Thought Leaders and Influencers on Artificial Intelligence (September 2019), we asked a selection of our Thinkers360 global influencers about their predictions for AI in 2020. Here’s what they told us…
What are your predictions for artificial intelligence in 2020?
When data and algorithms are king, then moral and ethical integrity is queen.
In light of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the New York Times ran a headline: “Don’t Fix Facebook. Replace It!”. In the intelligent age, organizations will win in the long-term when their leadership is based on a moral and ethical foundation – something only humans can provide. The European Commission’s ‚ethics for trustworthy AI‘-initiative marks a milestone on the road towards the responsible development and deployment of human-centric AI. The broader application of such standards will reduce the uncertainty in society and markets regarding the dark uses of AI.
European leaders should join forces to find ways for the conscious handling of social, cultural, and ethical dilemmas and accelerate the AI ethics movement worldwide.
– Dr. Carsten Linz, Group Digital Officer BASF, Author Radical Business Model Transformation
AI will be widely deployed within organizations across all industries and all types of applications. AI API’s such as text to speech, speech to text, facial detection and recognition, object recognition, gesture recognition, and image recognition, will democratize AI application creation, empowering development and accelerating adoption. Every software vendor will be integrating Machine Learning and AI applications within their respective domains in response to the ever increasing demand for optimized Machine Learning and AI capabilities.
– Ronald van Loon, Global Top 10 AI & IoT Influencer
China will further shape its leading role in AI, especially in healthcare and automotive.
Decentralized data markets idea to ensure transparency over data ownership and use will be further developed with fist big technology deployments carried out.
Machine Learning and automation will drill into every business and every sector of economy.
Machine Learning will become a lucrative area for cybercriminals.
– Anastassia Dr. Lauterbach, CEO & Founder, 1AU Ventures Ltd.
In 2020, the deployment of AI based predictive analytics to help academics to identify students at risk for positive interventions will continue to gain traction, but it needs to accelerate. The human cost of university student dropout is devastating for the individual and the financial cost to institutions is huge, often tens of thousands of dollars per student. In the UK and the US attrition rates are over 6% and 25% on student populations of over 500,000 and 2,000,000 respectively – do the math. Current systems focus on big data, using student cohorts of hundreds and thousands and tens of data attributes per student. Institutions freeze in the face of such large scale implementations and also as a result of justifiable fears on privacy, ethical and moral issues. There is now evidence that first steps can be made using small student cohorts of less than 30 students, with a handful of uncontroversial attributes, leading to useful predictions of students at risk and consequential positive interventions. Success in such first steps will encourage more ambitious progress into the deployment of such systems. All our futures depend on helping the next generations to develop.
– Ed Wakelam, Lecturer, University of Hertfordshire (Editor’s note: See Journal Paper)
Most of the more well-known use-cases for artificial intelligence to this point have been voice recognition, bots, and/or machine learning. Tech giants and thousands of start-ups are working diligently on the evolving AI, but candidly, it still falls short of the abilities of a human brain. It may take several years, possibly even decades, and much more compute power before we see the true ability for AI to solve logic problems and have reasoning on par with the human brain.
But, during that journey, we will see this exciting innovation drive some amazing evolutions for AI.
Heading into the future for businesses that aspire to successfully transform their businesses and improve customer experiences, they will look to advances in AI around logistical efficiencies, virtual assistants, conversational bots, voice recognition paired with translation, recommendation engines, image recognition, autonomous vehicles and cyber defense to name a few. These AI-based technologies will become so common that nearly everyone on the planet will interact with four or more of these capabilities each and every day. In fact, most of us already are interacting daily with AI at some level and don’t even know it. Just ask Siri on your smartphone or ask Alexa to buy something from Amazon.
– Mark Lynd, Head of Digital Business, Netsync
The impact of AI will be immense over the next few years. It will help digital marketers make better decisions to target audiences, analyse insights and maximise their efforts. Smart technologies and automation will make us stronger to understand and process customers data, but it won’t replace us. Digital marketers will have the opportunity to be more creative and strategic.
– Jennifer Sanchis, Account Manager at PRIME Research | Outstanding Young Communicator 2019
I expect to see major advanced announced in the use of AI in drug development and medical diagnostics. This past year we saw cases of drugs being developed by ML processes at a speed magnitudes faster than standard processes. The impact on the pharma market, in terms of both time to market and cost, is immense.
We’ll see an advance in the use of AI for medical imaging. We’ve already seen this past year that deep learning systems can perform as well or better than radiologists on many imaging diagnoses. This will see implementation in practice.
More widespread usage of ML in financial services.
– Marc Stein, CEO, Underwrite.AI
AI will hit the wall in 2020. Despite all of the hype and promise of AI its greatest limitation will be the fact that data storage costs are just too high to make the economics of AI feasible at scale. A single AV producing 2 TB of data daily would cost about $3 Million in yearly cloud data storage. (Some AVs generate 10+TB daily!) Even one percent of that data will double the price of an AV. We need breakthroughs in both the economics and technology of data storage if AI is going to make a significant difference.
– Tom Koulopoulos, Chairman & Founder, Delphi Group
AI in 2020 starts to become a common component in business conversations. It will be seen as a “possible,” solution to complex data based opportunities. It is however still going to be misunderstood, misrepresented as a Golden Fleece solution and still vastly under invested in. 80% of the major corporations investing in it believe they are not correctly investing in it and question how it can deliver against the promise in 2020.
Only 6% of major corporations have deep levels of commitment to using AI mostly around machine learning and deep learning but real value is tough to illustrate. For the other 25% of corporations experimenting with AI there is a 55% chance that it is not seeing any real Roi yet. For this to change in 2020 corporations need to have 100 points of proof to drive value and also change the conversation.
– Michael Gale, Managing Partner, Inc.Digital
I think 2020 will be the year when AI becomes more democratized throughout the organization. Not only will we see people from outside the IT and analytics departments demanding to use AI tools, but they will start to create their own AI-based apps. Organizations need to respond to this by increasing the training offered throughout the business and easing the transition of new apps into the corporate workflow.
– Adi Gaskell, Director, The Horizons Tracker
In 2020, we will see AI becoming more advanced by playing against itself at levels and speeds unthinkable to humans (think of the 500 million games of hide and seek but than more). In addition, we will see transfer learning becoming more important and leading to new breakthroughs in AI development. While most of these developments will be taken place in research environments, slowly we will see this type of advanced AI move to the enterprise. All in all, the year 2020 will be a fascinating year when it comes to AI.
– Dr. Mark van Rijmenam, Founder, Datafloq
2020 will be the year that separates the AI poseurs from the real players. Today, every enterprise software vendor has slapped the AI label on their technology. By next year, the solutions that leverage AI for clear business value will move forward, while the other vendors will have to rethink their strategies.
– Jason Bloomberg, President, Intellyx
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