As we head into the last quarter of 2020 and look to 2021, there really is little doubt that AI will be THE element businesses and employees embrace. The automation of all things will be key. There are several interesting data points, news announcements that are reinforcing this:
- VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said at VMworld that he wants to “unleash AI for every enterprise”
- NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said at NVIDIA GTC that “the Age of AI is in full throttle”
- Cisco SVP Jeetu Patel said: AI innovations will meet the goal of making meetings 10x better than being there in person. The company launched new features and a new interface earlier this month that will help employees return to work safely. (CRN)
- At Zoomtopia last week CEO Eric Yuan said, “Technology wise, we need to invest more in AI to give the right people the right access to the right information when they need it most.” (ZDNet)
- Gartner’s Hype Cycle for AI noted, “If AI as a general concept was positioned on this year’s Gartner Hype Cycle, it would be rolling off the Peak of Inflated Expectations. By that we mean that AI is starting to deliver on its potential and its benefits for businesses are becoming a reality,” Svetlana Sicular, VP Analyst, Gartner.
- And Futurum’s Daniel Newman wrote about the democratization of AI in Forbes, “While many feel that AI is something of a “Future” trend. It is very much a part of our every day lives. Impacting what we see on social media to movies recommended on Netflix or products that are suggested when we are shopping on Amazon. As computing power continues to be more affordable and the cloud enables access to this computing power as well as software and frameworks, more and more companies will be able to benefit from AI.”
- At Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live 2020 virtual event this week, AI can help prevent possible police abuse.
To date, AI has been used in a few verticals, but the world is now on the precipice of an AI explosion. The infusion of AI into consumer devices, business applications, IT infrastructure and cloud services will completely reshape how we live, learn and work. AI is having a profound impact as it changes the way we shop, it enables returning to safe workplaces, improves customer and employee experiences, raises productivity and more. Success with AI is only as good as the data that feeds into the machine learning algorithms and getting the right data that’s accurate and unbiased is where the hard work of AI is done. How we all show up in the AI era will determine our success in 2021.