But it’s time to let the past go and point our bows toward the future. It’s no longer possible to estimate how much the machine learning and AI markets are worth, because the line between what’s an AI-based technology and what isn’t has become so blurred that Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all “AI companies” that also do other stuff. Your local electricity provider uses AI and so does the person who takes those goofy real-estate agent pictures you see on park benches. Everything is AI — an axiom that’ll become even truer in 2020. We solicited predictions for the AI industry over the next year from a panel of experts, here’s what they had to say:
Marianna Tessel, CTO at Intuit
Jesse Mouallek, Head of Operations for North America at Deepomatic
Hannah Barnhardt, VP of Product Strategy Marketing at Deluxe Entertainment
Tristan Greene, reporter for The Next Web
Here’s hoping your 2020 is fantastic. And, if we can venture a final prediction: stay tuned to TNW because we’re going to dive deeper into the world of artificial intelligence in 2020 than ever before. It’s going to be a great year for humans and machines. AI will eat the world in ways we can’t imagine today: AI is often talked about as though it is a Sci-Fi concept, but it is and will continue to be all around us. We can already see how software and devices have become smarter in the past few years and AI has already been incorporated into many apps. AI enriched technology will continue to change our lives, every day, in what and how we operate. Personally, I am busy thinking about how AI will transform finances – I think it will be ubiquitous. Just the same way that we can’t imagine the world before the internet or mobile devices, our day-to-day will soon become different and unimaginable without AI all around us, making our lives today seem so “obsolete” and full of “unneeded tasks.” We will see a surge of AI-first apps: As AI becomes part of every app, how we design and write apps will fundamentally change. Instead of writing apps the way we have during this decade and add AI, apps will be designed from the ground up, around AI and will be written differently. Just think of CUI and how it creates a new navigation paradigm in your app. Soon, a user will be able to ask any question from any place in the app, moving it outside of a regular flow. New tools, languages, practices and methods will also continue to emerge over the next decade. If companies don’t adapt to the current trends in AI, they could see tough times in the future. Increased productivity, operational efficiency gains, market share and revenue are some of the top line benefits that companies could either capitalize or miss out on in 2020, dependent on their implementation. We expect to see a large uptick in technology adoption and implementation from companies big and small as real-world AI applications, particularly within computer vision, become more widely available. We don’t see 2020 as another year of shiny new technology developments. We believe it will be more about the general availability of established technologies, and that’s ok. We’d argue that, at times, true progress can be gauged by how widespread the availability of innovative technologies is, rather than the technologies themselves. With this in mind, we see technologies like neural networks, computer vision and 5G becoming more accessible as hardware continues to get smaller and more powerful, allowing edge deployment and unlocking new use cases for companies within these areas. Leveraging AI toolsets to automate garnering insights into deep catalogs of content will increase efficiency for clients and partners, and help uphold the high-quality content that viewers demand. A greater number of studios and content creators will invest and leverage AI/ML to conform and localize premium and niche content, therefore reaching more diverse audiences in their native languages. The prospect of an Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders taking office shakes the Facebooks and Microsofts of the world to their core, but companies who are already deeply invested in providing law enforcement agencies with AI systems that circumvent citizen privacy stand to lose even more. These AI companies could be inflated bubbles that pop in 2021, in the meantime they’ll look to entrench with law enforcement over the next 12 months in hopes of surviving a Democrat-lead government. Look for marketing teams to get slicker as AI-washing stops being such a big deal and AI rinsing — disguising AI as something else — becomes more common (ie: Ring is just a doorbell that keeps your packages safe, not an AI-powered portal for police surveillance, wink-wink).
