Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019.  Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Zachary Jarvinen, Head of Technology Strategy, AI and Analytics and Savinay Berry, Vice President of Cloud Services, OpenText

What 2019 Brings for the Enterprise in Artificial Intelligence and Cloud Technologies

As new technologies, such as AI and the cloud, continue to proliferate businesses, what does this mean for the enterprise, as well as customers, in 2019? Here are what experts in AI and Analytics and Cloud Services at OpenText expect to see in the New Year:

Zachary Jarvinen, Head of Technology Strategy, AI and Analytics 

2019's AI Story - Enterprise AI Transformation to Begin

The long-promised enterprise AI transformation is poised to begin in earnest in 2019. Most enterprises have reached a point of digital maturity, ensuring access to quality data at scale. With mature data sets, AI providers can offer lower cost, easier to use AI tools for specific business use cases. The effect of enterprise AI at scale will be significant. Gartner expects the business value of AI to hit nearly $3.9 trillion in by 2022. Consumers also stand to benefit in almost every sector. They'll see more innovative products and services, smarter homes, factories and cities, improved health, and a higher quality of life.

AI Augmenting the Workforce, A Symbiotic Relationship Between Humans and AI

AI will augment - not replace - the workforce. AI applications will be transformational, improving efficiency and performance, generating huge cost savings, and giving rise to more innovative products and services. However, the future of work will involve humans and AI. The most innovative companies have already started planning how to best make this symbiotic future a reality. In the shorter term - this means the gap in skilled workers in data science will persists and demand will remain very high. Educational opportunities will expand to help address the need. In the long term - as we develop the skills and technology to unlock AI - society stands to benefit enormously from AI-augmented workers, homes, vehicles, power grids, factories, cities, more.

Savinay Berry, Vice President of Cloud Services

Increase in adoption of cloud and proliferation of new cloud solutions and services

The proliferation of new cloud solutions and services will continue in 2019 driven by customers who are looking to move faster into the cloud in the coming years.  All industries are looking for a stable and secure infrastructure for information management in the cloud. This includes previously cloud-weary sectors such as manufacturing, financial services, legal, life sciences, and government. In fact, life sciences is one area where we are seeing customers move more aggressively to the cloud than ever before. Also - workloads matter. Typical workloads that are moving to the cloud faster are things like HR, contracts, legal, collaboration, digital asset management etc.

Higher Demand for Flexible Hybrid Cloud Deployments

In the last year, organizations have realized the benefits of hybrid deployments, such as helping to minimize risk and cost while allowing organizations to leverage the efficiency and scale of the cloud. The vast majority of the organizations we work with - The largest corporations and governments in the world - leverage hybrid-cloud infrastructure. Examples include keeping the system of record on premise, while enabling the system of collaboration in the cloud - both tightly integrated such that it is seamless to the user.  In 2019, companies will demand even more flexible hybrid deployments, including "multicloud" deployments leveraging services from many different vendors and blending both public and private clouds for maximum impact. 

Advancements in the availability of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies will enable actionable insights in the right place, right time and right context

Imagine if a procurement manager gets an insight that lets them know that the contracts they are negotiating is not giving them the best terms since the benchmark in the industry was different. Or imagine if a marketing manager is creating content for a campaign and is given the ability to do image compare by actually clicking on the sections in the image that are different - and why they are are different. Simple insights like these will save users hundreds of hours of wasted time - but to enable them will require an extremely smart AI service which connects with the content and data. Given the advancements in availability of this technology - 2019 will be an exciting time to enable these type of "magical" use cases.

The Intersection of IoT and blockchain will create tangible benefits for customers

Imagine a world of smart contracts that are used by freight forwarders and carriers, where a ship can get authorized to enter a dock purely based on a smart contract that has been validated using the blockchain ledger. This can be game changing for the shipping industry and save them millions of dollars. Smart contracts will be powered by the cloud and enabled anywhere. Another technology that will gain traction is containerization. Containerization will start to create tangible benefits to customers by reducing TCO of solutions in the cloud.

The Connected and Intelligent Enterprise will continue to become more dispersed and more collaborative thanks to the cloud. 

With the cloud, workers can access important documents, information and systems from virtually anywhere - enabling remote workforces and real-time collaboration.  The cloud will also continue to change how the enterprise stores, manages and secures information. Regulatory pressure and new privacy concerns may also lead to more investment and focus on security and information management in the cloud.

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About the Authors

Zachary Jarvinen, Head of Technology Strategy, AI and Analytics, OpenText

Zachary is the head of technology strategy around AI and Analytics for OpenText, where his team is responsible for commercializing and productizing all the AI/ML and analytics offerings. Prior to OpenText, Zachary held positions as product marketing director at TapClicks and head of product, growth and analytics at bSafe. Zachary holds MBAs from The Anderson School of Management from the University of California, Los Angeles and the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Savinay Berry, Vice President of Cloud Services, OpenText