Thinkers360 2021 Predictions are member-sourced predictions from our opt-in B2B thought leader and influencer community with 25M+ followers on social media combined. The 2021 Predictions for AI are part of a series intended to provide actionable insights for business and technology executives.
We asked a selection of our Thinkers360 global influencers about their predictions for AI in 2021. Here’s what they told us…
What are your predictions for artificial intelligence in 2021?
For 2021, we’ll see a rise in solutions that drive connectivity, ubiquitous cloud, and intelligence across any scenario via integrated architectures such as Intelligent Twins, enabling further development of smart cities, enterprises, and industries. It’s a response to the growing need for smarter ecosystems, process and service experience optimization, and stronger competitive drivers at a time when organizations must enable faster transformation and business model innovation. Cloud is the foundation for the Intelligent Twins, and organizations can approach this through either a single or multi cloud deployment depending on their business’s requirements, technology, strategy, and scale.
– Ronald van Loon, Global Top 10 AI & IoT Influencer
In a post-COVID world, there will be an acceleration of AI adoption in the enterprise. AI business applications will be centred around automating tasks, forecasting supply disruptions, and enhancing customer behavioural analytics. There will be a rise in industry/sector specific AI applications where business domain knowledge and business content data are the main differentiators. However, an increase in AI adoption rate does not necessarily translate into a higher success rate. To avoid failure, business executives need to develop a robust AI strategy & metrics, enhance data quality, and focus on AI integration & governance.
– Dr. Djamila Amimer, CEO and Founder, Mind Senses Global
GPT-5 will generate conversations that amuse many, but won’t persuade sensible people that AGI is near. Waymo will gradually increase the number of journeys with no safety driver, but many people will remain sceptical about the imminence of self-driving cars. We will hear a great deal more about Digital Twins, but there won’t yet be a working successor to Google Glass. More companies will report verifiable financial benefits from deploying Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and from using Machine Learning to analyse customer and process data.
– Calum Chace, “The AI guy” – Global keynote speaker on Artificial Intelligence – Author of “Surviving AI”, “The Economic Singularity”
In 2021, leading corporations will break through the institutional barriers preventing the large scale exploitation of artificial intelligence driven adaptive learning systems to rapidly develop the key in-demand skills of their workforces. Even more critically, to rapidly clone staff whose key skills represent the business multipliers which fuel revenue growth through the exploitation of new disruptive technologies. The step change efficiency and personalisation of learning provided by these new methods eclipses traditional, flowchart type implementations of on-line training. Executive management ambition to evolve to this next level will only be limited by the scarcity of deployment experts with the unique combination of business, pedagogy and AI skills essential to success.
– Dr Ed Wakelam, Research Fellow, University of Hertfordshire
After a year where it’s felt humans couldn’t become more disconnected from one another, businesses will use AI in 2021 to create more and deeper human connections. Businesses will leverage AI with the express purpose of knowing when and how to engage with their customers, making the human moments more personal and impactful.
– John Bruno, Vice President, Commerce Strategy, PROS
AI will become a critical and integral approach to product development. AI will no longer be a bolt-on or an afterthought when it comes to developing new platforms and products. Utilizing AI as a built-in, out-of-the-box feature and capability will become common place. AI will become native to the best-in-class technology solutions.
– Donna Peeples, Senior Vice President and Chief Client Officer at FIS
I predict AI will be pervasive in the next few years across the enterprises. More emphasis will be on building Trusted AI, Edge AI, and Ethical AI solutions to witness the real impact of AI. Unsupervised, reinforcement, federated, and generative adversarial learning methodologies will attain more momentum in 2021. Organizations may focus on using AI with unstructured dark data to build cognitive systems for decision making and gaining efficiency. Covid-19 pandemic will make AI more essential across the industry verticals.
– Dr. Sunil Kumar Vuppala, Director, Data Science, Ericsson
As more and more production AI-based systems come in to play and greater amounts of data are collected, we will see more personalized and tailored services. This will have significant impacts on industries such as healthcare, transportation and financial services to name a few. Therefore it will be critical for these solutions be ethical in their design, development and production or the impact could be far less privacy and more intrusive solicitations.
– Mark Lynd, Head of Digital Business, Netsync
Every company should have access to data analysis with AI and ML as a core. My prediction is that AI as a service will become a standard. Using AI as a service will allow you to use providers of a service as a platform for all your applications. You will then learn and gain the know-how which later will allow you to have your own personal AI strategy. AI as a service will ensure you simplify feed with your own data and pay for what you use (algorithms and all resources).
– Nicolas Babin, President, Babin Business Consulting
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) will continue to evolve as the industry and organization understand the incredible power offered by the solutions driven by these transformational technologies. However, the transformative results through AI will not come without effort. To unlock the full potentials of the AI, ML, and DL organizations will have to do the heavy lifting of going on, ‘all in’ digital transformation, embracing data sovereignty, and accelerating their computing methodologies. AI will be the dominant technology witnessing the adoption of viable real-time applications with ample commercial use-cases with ROI generating apps rather than just experiments especially with the significant impact caused by the Covid-19 Pandemic which has become apparent that smart machines and self-teaching algorithms will play a major role in the ongoing fight against this outbreak as well as how it is helping disrupt and transform every industry verticals and the very face of the way we live, work, and socialize. Automation, Predictive, Prevention and Smarter Big Data Analytics and Insights is what the businesses will offer as AI will become its substratum.
– Rajashree Rao, Head of Partnerships & Ecosystem (APAC) at R² Data Labs, Rolls-Royce
Artificial Intelligence is just going to be embedded into everything we do within 12 to 24 months, it is like the Internet in the 1990s and people would be skeptical if we told them back then that Internet is not a technology, it is just a way of life. The “AI- ization” of everything is real, it is here and now.
– Nitin Kumar, CMC, CMAA, Chief Executive Officer, Appnomic
I believe growth will thrive at the intersection of humanity and AI. The year 2021 will be the beginning of the Cyborg era, when humans start cohabitating and collaborating with machines for more nonroutine tasks. AI will multiply our capacity to integrate work with life in better, smarter and more seamless ways. It is critical for business to create a culture of sharing, upskill its workforce for more rapid realignment to changing dynamics, and embrace a simpler and more agile practice to adapt faster.
– Helen Yu, Founder & CEO, Tigon Advisory Corp.
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