Artificial Intelligence Q1 2017 trends. What key lessons did we learn?

I agree that this trend becomes highly visible in many consumer and business applications during last five years.

Yes, we see that the teams that design and build self-driving cars, advanced robotics systems or modern virtual agents spent a lot of time on experimental design, model training, and testing to achieve desirable results.
For instance, Baidu (the Chinese equivalent of Google) has as many as 1,300 staff in its AI division and is targeting a launch of its own self-driving cars in 2020.

There are no doubts that ability to acquire new skills is the necessary condition for a success of any team working in the field of AI. As you can see from the graph below (2) the number of articles in artificial intelligence was growing almost exponentially in the last 50 years. The teams that are working in AI must keep up with all this new information and knowledge.

Will AI replace humans or help them?

When we talk about AI progress in the next 10 -20 years the emphasis is on how AI technologies can help humans rather than replacing human intelligence and creativity. These AI technologies can:

Amplify human intelligence.

Here are few use cases that are adopted by many businesses already:

• AI powered scoring tools, combined with a training chatbot make salespeople smarter.
• Customer support associates routinely use automated process guidance and knowledge search.
• Software developers may benefit from analysis of best practices and pitfalls of development decisions.

Liberate employees from banal or onerous tasks.

Many responsibilities at enterprises require little cognitive effort on the part of humans, but they have been historically out of reach of machine intelligence.

The systems powered by artificial intelligence algorithms may process audio signals, images, and video and drive automated decisions based on the outcome.   These technologies combining with Natural Language Processing (NLP) may automate many routine customer services or business process tasks.

Enable robotic processes for self-healing and self-correcting systems.

AI technologies can also be extremely valuable in scenarios where there will never be a direct interaction with a human being beyond the setup and deployment.

I always think about NASA and automated space operations when we talk about the self-healing and self-correcting systems. However, such systems today have much more close to the earth applications in automated IT operations, manufacturing processes, infrastructure or business process automation. An example is HIRO™ technology developed by Arago (3).

AI technologies mimic humans’ abilities

Authors of the report arranged all 13 AI technologies in a way how they mimic humans’ abilities to sense, think, and act while constantly learning.

Sense

• Image and video analysis
• Biometrics
• Speech recognition
• Text analytics and Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Think

• Machine learning platforms
• Deep learning platforms
• Semantic technology
• AI-optimized hardware
• Swarm intelligence

Act

• Natural language generation
• Decision management

Sense, think, and act

• Robotic process automation
• Virtual agents

Artificial Intelligence Ecosystem Phases

The Forrester report plots all 13 technologies positions in Ecosystem phases in one chart. I find this chart very illustrative to understand the current and predicted state of all technologies.

Ecosystem Phases definitions(4):

Phase 1: Creation in the labs. In the Creation phase, the technology is not yet commercially available or is only available as an alpha version. Cutting-edge IT shops and emerging technology teams want to understand how long it will take to get their hands on beta versions. The technology is not ready for production implementation except in specialized cases, and its potential for business value-add is uncertain.

Phase 2: Survival in the market. During the Survival phase, the very first commercial and open source products hit the market; initial production environment deployments take place; and the ecosystem expands to include suppliers, customers, and enablers like systems integrators. Leading-edge customers and end users begin to share their experiences with the product. There are many vendors competing to earn plaudits and early customer wins.

Phase 3: Growth as adoption takes off. In the Growth phase, the ecosystem either reaches a level of diversity and resilience that sustains the technology’s existence or the ecosystem lacks momentum and the technology slowly slumps into decline and obsolescence. Widespread implementations produce piles of evidence, which allows potential customers to make better-informed decisions. The technology’s value proposition has crystallized and stabilized. Vendor consolidation begins. New entrants must acquire an existing player to enter the market.

Phase 4: Equilibrium from the installed base. During the Equilibrium phase, which can last for several years — or even decades for hardware — the ecosystem is large and resilient. The benefits and limitations of the technology are documented and well known. At the end of this phase, installed customer numbers fall as some firms switch to new substitute technologies. The market is highly consolidated, customer numbers flatten, and revenues level off or decline.

Phase 5: Decline into obsolescence. In the Decline phase, forcing factors — such as new regulations, changes in the business environment, a shrinking talent pool, or the launch of disruptive competing technologies — destabilize the ecosystem. Customers, vendors, and complementary organizations like service providers bail out. Some firms continue to run the technology, but vendors stop supporting it.The

Forester’s report also provides the profile card for each of the technologies with the following elements:

• Definition Usage scenarios
• Vendors
• Estimated cost to implement
• Ecosystem phase
• Business value-add, adjusted for uncertainty
• Time to reach next phase
• Trajectory (known or prospective)

I recommend downloading the Artificial Intelligence Technologies, Q1 2017 report for all business executives who want to get a sense how artificial intelligence technologies provide benefits today or may help or create a competitive threat in nearest future.

Future of Artificial Intelligence

We imagine that the evolution of artificial intelligence technologies has broader scope and time horizon than it is outlined in Forrester’s report.

I want to conclude the blog with the quote said by Stephen Hawking in a video appearance at the 2017 Global Mobile Internet Conference Beijing: