Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021. Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Ethical AI, Hyperautomation and a Whole New Cloud Strategy
By Ed Macosky, Head of Product at Boomi,
a Dell Technologies business
If 2020's accelerated digital transformation
wasn't fast enough, Boomi's Head of Product, Ed Macosky, predicts 2021 will be
a year of even more change and growth with renewed approaches to ethical AI,
business strategy, and cloud journeys.
2021 is going to be a big year that will see
even more changes in the way enterprises operate, and how workforces within
these enterprises interact. In particular, we'll see advances as it relates to
AI and shifts when it comes to companies' journeys to the cloud. Here are my
predictions for what 2021 has in store:
Leaders
will take a critical look at AI with a new legal, moral and ethical lens. The last few months have put a critical eye on AI and the unknown
biases they could have, especially in social media - and the warnings have come
through to tech leaders loud and clear. Next year, we'll see business looking
through a new lens when implementing AI, especially for tasks like hiring. That
perspective will extend when it comes to deepening automation strategies, and
leaders will act with more cautionary forethought to ensure customers trust in
AI-driven processes and the insights they provide.
In
2021, hyperautomation is going to reshape how we understand and use data. The vast cloud migration over the past several months has led to an
abundance of big data - big unstructured data, for the most part. Driven by
artificial intelligence, hyperautomation will help businesses categorize the
data and draw new, actionable insights. The industry has said before how data
can help with business decisions and the importance of IT's role in the bottom
line. What AI and hyperautomation will do for data in the next year exemplifies
that merging of IT and business.
Time to
value is the biggest trend I'm seeing around business and IT leaders. With AI, that likely means looking externally and partnering with a
third-party, as AI talent is expensive and scarce. I recommend focusing first
on hyperautomation that helps organize and categorize your data. This makes it
easier to layer other AI on top of it and give you, if not instantaneous
insights, then a way to quickly derive some.
2021 is
the year companies restart and update their cloud journeys. Ready or not, businesses have been jolted by the need to transform and
must spend the next year figuring out how to be strategic about their cloud
game plan. Next year, businesses will
take a breath to figure out how to be strategic about their cloud strategies
and make the necessary adjustments. Truly understanding the digital mandate
will be the difference between survival and making the cloud transition happen
- or getting weighed down in the past. That's why we'll see cloud restarts and
updates as businesses figure out how to implement cloud - including hybrid and
multi-cloud - effectively.
IT
departments will completely shift to multi-cloud practices in 2021. Prior to the pandemic, I predicted a bigger shift from public to hybrid
cloud environments from the enterprise. But with much of the workforce now
moved to a remote model, many organizations have shifted full priority to the
public cloud due to limited resources for managing private clouds. Hedging bets
with just one cloud provider is too risky today, and we'll see IT leverage more
multi-cloud practices in the year ahead to take full advantage of its cost
savings and efficiency.
I'm excited to see how enterprises will
embrace these coming changes and continue to transform their operational
strategies, and Boomi will be ready as ever to help facilitate organizational
shifts by uniting everything and everyone in our digital ecosystem across
channels, devices and platforms.
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About the Author
Ed Macosky is the Head of Product at Boomi,
a Dell Technologies business. He has more than 15 years of experience building
high performing agile teams, designing and launching new software and service
products, solution delivery and customer retention. Macosky works to establish
and execute Boomi's product vision and roadmap - delivering an intelligent,
flexible and scalable integration platform that accelerates business outcomes
by making information, interactions and innovations flow faster.