Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023. Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
4 ways AI's evolving in 2023 - Can your company keep up?
By
Sreekanth Singaraju, Senior Vice President of AI and Cloud Solutions, Mobiquity
Artificial intelligence is achieving sci-fi
movie level capabilities. Whether it's robot arms performing automated skills with growing
specificity, popular text-to-art generators online, or
complete reimaginations of chess gameplay, AI is
increasingly embedded into everyday life.
It's clear that for businesses to stay
competitive, they need to keep up with this unprecedented and ongoing expansion
of AI. But with so many potential applications available, it can be hard to
know where to start.
My recommendation: To know how to apply AI
effectively in your business, you first need to understand how the technology
is set to evolve. Once you know where challenges and opportunities are likely
to arise, you can plan how to respond - and set your company up for success in
2023 and beyond.
4 predictions for the future of AI
While not every business is seeking out
revolutionary developments in AI, every industry leader will have to
incorporate AI in their business models to stay dominant in their fields.
Here's what they'll have top of mind for next year.
1. GAN has proven impressive ability throughout 2022.
Now it's time to level up. Until recently, if you
wanted to conceive a unique picture - say, of the founding fathers playing
poker - you'd have to commission a cartoonist to create it. But with the
generative adversarial network (GAN), you're able to create those images
in minutes, with minimal computing power. This software can take a piece
of text, interpret it, filter through millions of pre-existing images,
then come up with something entirely new that's representative of the
original text. All in seconds.
So if that's what GAN
can do with trivial amounts of power, it's remarkable to think of what it could
make next, with substantive computing force into it. Innovation will center
around creating things that have never existed before, challenging not just
creativity and art, but revolutionizing how the world is known at all - one
example: AI's increasingly being used to generate new math proofs, potentially reconfiguring how
parts of the hard sciences are understood entirely.
With the global AI market expected to rapidly grown over the next
decade, there's a sure amount of funding and confidence behind it.
2. For most companies, AI's biggest value add will be
behind the scenes. While flashy AI applications
like GAN might grab headlines today, in the coming years, AI's influence
will be increasingly less overt as it's embedded into more day-to-day
business functions. In software engineering, for example, AI-driven
assistive technologies will help developers write code faster and test
more efficiently.
And it won't just be
in tech circles either. AI's impact in every industry will grow to the point
where it doesn't feel so new anymore. However, organizations will still need to
drive internal discussions around how to apply AI to draw upon its maximum
potential.
3. AI is making progress toward total automation. AI's current successes mostly focus on its ability to identify.
For example, a computer vision algorithm can determine if a cat's in a
picture as opposed to a human, and if it's a human, an AI-driven sentiment
analysis tool can start to identify mood and personality. With the right
information and context, an AI system can successfully identify patterns
and provide solutions in response.
But AI often falls
short when it's used to solve human-centric problems, like resolving human
errors through a chatbot or moderating content on social media. In fact, it can actually make these processes even worse.
AI technologies are designed to optimize workflows, not stall them and 2023
will see an increased focus on refining AI's ability to automate processes
effectively. While we won't likely achieve the ultimate goal of total
automation next year, we will start to see tangible progress on various
components and improved automation capabilities, including greater computing
power, more effective data pools and better organizational systems to work
from.
4. For most organizations, a lack of data organization
often holds AI's capabilities back. With so much
riding on businesses' abilities to leverage AI, it's important
organizations organize the data informing AI models and algorithms well.
But legacy operations often don't streamline the data they collect
effectively, meaning that data may be kept in a variety of locations and
formats, under various keywords and labels. Disorganization like this
makes integration with AI harder, as AI has to sift through more
information to collect what it needs. And when newer competitors are starting
from the ground up with data organized from the get-go intuitively to be
compatible with AI, older operations fall behind.
Eighty-seven percent of organizations back AI to give
them an advantage over rivals, but it's difficult to actualize this
advantage without a solid foundation. The companies grounding their AI systems
in effectively aggregated and collated data in 2023 will be the ones leading
their industries in AI innovation.
Following through in 2023
Industry leaders are taking advantage of the
major strides AI has made in the last year, but decision-makers recognize
there's more to it than just having the technology in place. There are greater
opportunities for AI and ML growth for 2023 - but it comes down to whether or
not organizations are able to overcome the barriers in their way.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sree Singaraju is the Senior Vice President of AI and Cloud Solutions at Mobiquity. In his experience, the cloud is the key enablement ingredient for any digital solution: mobile, voice, web, chat, AI/ML. Blending his experience leading transformations at organizations like Johnson & Johnson, Dun & Bradstreet, Merrill Lynch, and State Street Bank, with his expertise in cloud and artificial intelligence, Sree spends his time helping companies transform their goals into reality.