Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018. Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Peter Wallqvist, VP of Strategy, iManage
Five AI predictions for 2018
Practical AI Continues Its Take Over
In 2018 companies will increasingly realize that, rather than being a vague cure for anything and everything, AI’s value comes from its ability to solve practical, real-world business problems. In fact, AI will actually become less visible in many cases, as it is more tightly integrated into the everyday applications that people use everyday. Without even realizing it, they will find that AI enables them to be more productive, and frees them to spend more time on strategic business initiatives rather than tedious tasks.
More AI Integration
Technology industry leaders and even AI customers will increasingly find it valuable to integrate disparate AI technologies. As AI becomes less siloed, they will discover that when these different AI technologies are integrated, they can deliver more than the sum of their parts.
More AI technologies will no longer be called AI
Just as previous AI technologies like Google Translate, Alexa’s speech recognition and NetFlix’s recommendation engine are no longer perceived to be AI, newer AI technologies, such as document classification and information extraction, will become so integrated into our applications that they will no longer be perceived as AI either. Moreover, as AI technologies continue to proliferate, we will see people speaking about AI in more specific and tangible ways. This is a sign that technology is reaching practicality and maturity as it is increasingly used by a large general audience vs. niche ones.
AI will become a crucial part in security programs
Organizations will see more integration of AI into security and information governance technologies in order to lower the risk of and damage from cyberattacks. When it comes to detection of breaches, AI will be increasingly utilized to automatically build rules to identify user patterns, so that deviations in behavior that indicate a breach or malicious behavior can be detected.
Employee morale and retention will increase thanks to AI
Traditional industries like professional services (ie, law firms, insurance firms, etc.) who implement AI technologies will see a huge increase in employee morale and retention. Instead of being bogged down with boring, routine tasks, employees will have the opportunity to focus on more engaging, fulfilling work. This will prompt more firms to adopt AI, in order to keep employees from leaving their firm for another that is utilizing AI to reduce the amount of low-value, tedious work done by their employees.
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About the Author
Peter Wallqvist is Vice President of Strategy at iManage. He started his career in the information retrieval industry as a research engineer at BT Research at the turn of the millennium. From there he went on to being part of delivering some of the largest and high profile search and unstructured data processing systems in the world. In 2010, he co-founded AI pioneer RAVN Systems, which was acquired by iManage in 2017.
