“Q: How worried do you think we humans should be that machines will take our jobs?
A: It depends what role machine intelligence will play. Machine intelligence in some cases will be useful for solving problems, such as translation. But in other cases, such as in finance or medicine, it will replace people.”
This Q&A is taken from Tom Standage’s description of how he interviewed AI (language model GPT-2) for The Economist The World in 2020. As readers of this column’s annual roundup of AI predictions know, this year’s first installment of 120 AI predictions for 2020 featured my interview of Amazon AI in which Alexa performed slightly better than the previous year.
For the new list of 99 additional predictions, I repeated Standage’s question to Alexa, and got the response “Hmm, I’m not sure.” The following AI movers and shakers are a lot more confident in what the near future of machine intelligence will look like, from robotic process automation (RPA) to human intelligence augmentation (HIA) to natural language processing (NLP).
99 AI Predictions for 2020
“Consumer applications drive the usage of natural language via text or speech as the main interaction mode rather than cumbersome menus and multiple clicks. Especially from the perspective of executives, who need to run their own analytics queries on the fly and get immediate answers, having access to this type of AI yields huge advantages. Between the rising demand for these types of business use cases and the major breakthroughs in the Natural Language Processing techniques last year, 2020 is going to be a huge year for NLP implementations in software”—Inna Tokarev Sela, Head of AI, Sisense
“Rather than AI technology replacing humans, AI will continue to augment the human workforce. Take for example AI technology in an IT service desk—simple applications of the technology make it possible to connect employees to resources they need quickly”—Steve Stover, VP of Product, ITSM, SolarWinds
“2020 will be the year of augmented organizations, where AI will penetrate every area of the organization to augment human intelligence and enable employees to do their jobs more optimally. Due to the progress achieved during 2019 in the area of natural language processing, these kind of solutions will likely increase the levels of adoption compared to previous years”—Agustin Huerta, VP of Technology, Globant
“With the onset of cloud-native, web-based RPA platforms and rapidly maturing machine learning technologies that understand the written word and integrate resulting actions within an RPA platform, we’ll pass the tipping point towards ubiquitous adoption in the next year. By 2025, there will be easy-to-deploy-and-teach AI models for a large majority of paper documents in the enterprise, so that human workers will never need to process an invoice again”—Prince Kohli, CTO, Automation Anywhere
“The concept of AI as an assistant or collaborative intelligence will continue to grow mainstream, and companies will start to use their own data to create value-add, narrow AI models related to their core business to create differentiators. The key capability that will make or break this is effective data engineering—it must be mastered as part of the journey to more advanced AI. There is still a long road ahead in understanding and capitalizing on the capabilities and disruptive potential of general purpose AI”—James McGlennon, EVP and CIO, Liberty Mutual Insurance
“In 2020, AI will become more than a set of demanding workloads; it will become a foundational technology in the building of intelligent cloud hybrid infrastructures. Embedded AI will require intelligent mixed-media storage systems that can consistently meet the performance and capacity needs of AI-based business systems while at the same time improving availability, user satisfaction, and operational efficiency”—Stanley Zaffos, SVP of Product Marketing, Infinidat
“In 2020, AI gets personal. Many of us have come to expect solid recommendations for additional items to buy when we shop online, or new shows to watch on our favorite streaming service, but now we’ll start seeing that kind of personalization in places we may not expect. For example, looking at a wider range of a client’s behaviors to determine what kinds of educational content they might benefit most from, and sending those recommendations in a personally curated email message. It’s an easy way to add more value to interactions with clients, offering information that’s relevant to their needs and skipping the fluff”—Vijay Sankaran, CIO, TD Ameritrade
“Every company will become an AI company, modernizing their workforce to support innovation. As enterprises learn how to effectively and efficiently deploy AI-based projects in cloud environments, they’ll turn their attention toward hiring data analysts and scientists with expertise in machine learning and deep learning”—Ashish Thusoo, Co-Founder and CEO, Qubole
“In 2020, the thousands of companies created before the cloud will look to join the party, ushering in a much bigger phase of cloud growth. The process will begin by shifting their data to the cloud, providing an optimal environment for artificial intelligence and machine learning applications”—David Richards, Founder and CEO, WANdisco
“Chatbots will become more useful, even if they don’t pass the Turing test. The idea that chatbots need to interact with us like humans to be useful is a false assumption. Chatbot interactions don’t need to be fully conversational. Integrating AI with pre-programmed, robotic chatbots is much more scalable and cost-effective. In 2020, consumers should expect to encounter these robotic bots much more often”—Abinash Tripathy, Founder and CSO, Helpshift
“AI assistants like Siri and Alexa are going to become more useful and integrate into consumers' lives at a much more meaningful level. Being able to book hair appointments is just the start; by the end of 2020, even technologically-averse consumers will be using AI solely because it makes life easier”—Wayne Coburn, Principal Product Manager, Iterable
“2020 will see the rise of the citizen data scientist. Empowered with the latest cloud platforms that make AI accessible, non-technical employees across a business will upgrade processes in their own departments with machine intelligence. Expanding access beyond developers will yield a wave of pragmatic, everyday AI applications that will transform how we work”—Jeff Grisenthwaite, VP of Product, Catalytic
“As customer expectations rise for better delivery process and free and fast shipping in 2020, companies need to reinvent some of the ways their supply chain works to meet consumer demand, without getting a hit on their profits. Technologies like AI and ML will be used to better predict inventory, supply/demand, and help with returns and shipping, allowing organizations to modernize their supply chains and not only meet these high expectations, but exceed them”—Arpit Jain, VP of Delivery, Nerdery
“In 2020, AI-centric approaches will trickle down from the large manufacturers (such as jet engine makers, appliance manufacturers and auto factories) to small and medium-sized production operations who couldn't afford the investment or R&D commitment in the past. More and more tasks on smaller factory floors can be supplemented—or even replaced—through the use of customized, yet reasonably priced, AI solutions”—Alan Mindlin, Technical Manager, Morey
“There are currently 750,000 podcasts, and with this number growing daily, there’s simply too much content to analyze without automated intelligence. We predict that AI will enable better contextual relevance, increased brand safety, improved reporting, and enhanced discoverability for podcasting in 2020”—Sean King, EVP, Veritone One
“As we head into 2020, AI will continue to quickly become a more mainstream part of everyone’s lives, especially when used in combination with IoT and smart apps. 2020 will be a pivotal year for stronger master data management and product information capabilities with AI aiding in elements like text generation, and image classification through stronger natural language processing and recognition capabilities”—Dietmar Rietsch, CEO, Pimcore
“In 2020, we’ll see the hyper-personalization of suppliers. AI will be used to stream increasingly accurate information about supplier products and services, purchase history, and performance to inform decisions on vendor selection and management”—Walt Kristick, SVP of applied and advanced technology, APEX Analytix
“In 2020, healthcare organizations will leverage AI to assist medical staff in providing patients with possible prognoses for their symptoms. Developing AI tools that can be translated from one health system to another will have some complexity, but once the healthcare industry puts an effort behind allowing AI to become more scalable, solutions will be better positioned to move beyond a departmental or hospital specialty”—Jim VanderMey, CIO, OST
“In 2020, we will see a rise of predictive visitor attributes. Based on an ongoing collection of data, the historical visitor behavior coupled with outcome can be used to predict outcome for new visitors that start to exhibit similar behavior and the possibility of predictive visitor attributes is really limitless”—Mike Anderson, Co-Founder and CTO, Tealium
“In 2020, we will see many more companies advance their AI capabilities in order to understand their customers better. Despite these advances, they will struggle to drive value from those AI-driven insights in a meaningful way. This is because their marketing tools, processes and organizational structure are not set up for individualized execution. They are instead built for efficiency in a one-size-fits-all world. Without investment in new tools and process re-engineering, purpose-built to enable the application of AI to marketing at scale, companies will be stuck with shiny insights and little to show for it”—Christian Selchau-Hansen, Co-Founder and CEO, Formation
“2020 will be about bringing AI and machine learning into production. The shiny luster of AI and machine learning will start to wear off as more companies realize that AI/ML is not a silver bullet to their business problems and certainly not magic—it’s math. We’ll see a heightened sense of appreciation and need for data governance, data analysts, data engineers and machine learning engineers. Companies will create a data pipeline that continuously curates data for an A/B testing-capable ML pipeline to drive successful AI/ML projects in 2020”—Pat Ryan, Executive VP of Enterprise Architecture, SPR
“One area where AI is expected to be leveraged strongly is in the field of behavior predictions, where it can be used to better understand human motion, and potentially even predict what humans are about to do. In addition, there’s huge potential for the combination of motion capture and AI in clinical markets”—Mark Finch, CTO, Vicon
“In 2020, we will see artificial intelligence play a bigger role in real-time coaching and performance management specifically within sales. AI will play a key role in delivering sellers the content, training and coaching material they need at the very moment they need it, based both on their past performance and the opportunities they're currently working. AI will help replicate the behavior of top sellers and provide mid-performers with the materials and coaching they need to improve their outcomes”—Louis Jonckheere, Chief Product Officer, Showpad
“In 2020, natural language processing (NLP) will be the buzzword, just like AI was the buzzword in 2019, when there was a lot of confusion around what AI really meant. To make NLP successful, it requires a large amount of data. There’s no single enterprise that has enough data to the scale of what Amazon’s Alexa has to really provide high accuracy to help employees with their questions”—Pat Calhoun, CEO, Espressive
“While the cloud has provided AI the platform it needed to grow to the level of being available on nearly every technological device, the combination of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and edge computing will give AI the tools needed to evolve to the next frontier, with smarter and faster decision making for organizations in 2020”—Phil White, CTO, Scale Computing
“AI and human interactions will further merge online and will work together to enable customer innovations like conversational commerce. Retailers will use personal shoppers to create a customized shopping experience for consumers online and guide them to a purchase. But, these personal shoppers won't always be humans. Instead, humans will work together with bots online to guide the consumer towards the checkout”—Mike Myer, CEO, Quiq
“2020 is the year stores other than Amazon will begin to offer checkout-free shopping. These retailers are fundamentally broader in terms of a business model and won’t cater exclusively to upper middle class, tech-savvy shoppers in metropolitan areas. As a result, retail will be the industry that leads consumer acceptance of business integration with AI. Looking back, 2020 will be the first year of the decade of computer vision, in which many of the mundane tasks we all tolerate, like waiting in line, will be made lighter”—Will Glaser, Founder and CEO, Grabango
“Next year, diversity and AI conversations will move away from bias in the algorithms themselves to the types of problems AI can solve for diverse groups of people. While I think the tech industry has done a good job this year of quickly responding to ethical concerns raised about their AI systems, there is more work to be done to connect AI experts with a diverse community of problem owners—people who face major challenges in their daily lives—to expand the industry’s view of the problems we should be using AI to tackle”—Tara Chklovski, Founder and CEO, Technovation
“AI and ML algorithms are only as good as the data you feed them. While applications don’t live in isolation, their data often does. The problem arises when those applications can’t interact and communicate with each other, and companies need machine learning to bridge that gap. By introducing cross-application AI, data from disparate applications is accessible to all other apps, enabling valuable insights and ensuring that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”—Matthew Halliday, Co-Founder and VP of Product, Incorta
“If 2019 was the year the technology industry talked about the potential of AI, 2020 should be the year we shout about the potential for bias at scale caused by AI. As an industry, we need to focus on bringing diversity into every step of AI, from the teams designing these systems to the data used to train them”—Sudheesh Nair, CEO, ThoughtSpot
“AI and IoT will become commercialized for supply chain use. In 2020, we’ll see exponential increases in the technology that makes both personal lives and businesses better, as a result of cheaper and more reliable sensors, significant increases in data storage and processing capabilities, and increasing levels of familiarity with AI. Equally relevant is the massive impact AI will have on revenue generation”—Ron Volpe, VP of Apps Business Development, Tradeshift
“In 2020, we’ll move to AI/ML systems doing the work on our behalf in the form of proactive agents. For enterprises, purpose-built intelligence offers enormous potential to deliver productivity improvements and actionable business intelligence”—Andy Vitus, Partner, Scale Venture Partners
“In 2020 we can expect the growing awareness of ethical questions and AI to intensify. It will be a good year to continue our work leveraging the benefits of machine learning and artificial intelligence as we focus on minimizing the harmful downsides”—Kyle Dent, Research Area Manager, Machine Learning and Data Science, Interaction and Analytics Lab, PARC
“Hyper-automation will impact enterprise digital adoption and the workforce. Humans will need to work even more closely with technology going forward. While software applications are expected to become more intelligent, employees will need to be empowered to leverage these technologies and get benefits in becoming more effective and productive”—Khadim Batti, Co-Founder and CEO, Whatfix
“AI will, and already is, impacting how we buy food, clothes, shop for groceries online, as well as everyday interactions with people. The big opportunity we have with AI, however, is to help level out the playing field for those most in need. Knowledge is power, and with the power of AI we can help provide better accessibility to the vast knowledge locked in the internet for 20% of the population. Smart, driven and talented people are being left behind because they cannot access the internet effectively, or at all, due to some disability they have“—Gal Vizel, CMO, accessiBe
“Graphs will be considered a standard format for machine learning, much like tables are today for other workloads. We’ve already seen this shift starting in the AI research with significant results and we’re about to see this make a big impact in the data science community as a whole. When graphs become another standard format for machine learning, adding highly predictive relationships will become the norm and we’ll see immediate improvements in ML across industries”—Amy Hodler, Director of Graph Analytics and AI Programs, Neo4j
"We’re starting to automate the process of automation itself, a trend with massive potential benefits for businesses, and one that will accelerate dramatically in 2020. For example, millions upon millions of paper forms remain in use because it’s actually a pretty complex process to digitize them properly. We’re enabling the use of advanced image analytics and cognitive/predictive services to automatically recognize names, dates, addresses, and other data in paper forms and instantly create smart, sleek, digital versions to replace them”—Ryan Duguid, Chief of Evangelism and Advanced Technology, Nintex
“When it comes to the emergence of AI in email marketing, there are many forms and practical use cases where AI can be leveraged including automation, personalization, segmentation, send-time optimization, content and even subject lines. AI’s most valuable benefit is in helping email teams improve efficiency and as the technology becomes more scalable, intuitive, and easily accessible to existing workflows, AI will become an area more marketers dip their toes into in 2020”—Anthony Chiulli, Director of Product Marketing, 250ok
“We tend to think of AI as a silver bullet, something that will resolve all business problems with just one algorithm implementation, but this is a fallacy. In 2020, AI will be deployed against legacy databases to identify what data was stored in the first place, delete what is no longer needed and assign enriched metadata for better, more refined search and streamlined record-keeping. One behemoth won’t do this, but rather, a set of interconnected algorithms”—Dave Jones, VP of Marketing, AODocs
“With regard to risk and compliance, RPA will continue to make inroads in 2020. When needing to analyze large volumes of data for Fortune 500 companies, the volume of data just isn’t there to make the predictions of AI relevant. RPA works so well because many risk and compliance functions follow a formal process and there’s a much clearer path to automate those steps as companies put more and more data through the specific process. Other areas ripe for RPA application include third-party risk, IT, policy and procedure, and internal audits”—Matt Kunkel, CEO, LogicGate
“Businesses will start to receive recommendations from their texting providers about the type of messages to send, which messages are seeing the most engagement, clicks, etc. AI will be able to recommend more on the segments and groups from a business database on who reacts better or worse to certain messages, helping them to stop outreach to disinterested parties. However, it is vital for text marketing to keep the human element while leveraging AI to help us have the best communication possible”—Matt Reid, Chief Marketing Officer, EZ Texting
“In 2020, we will find ourselves in the midst of a recession, and AI can significantly soften the blow by matching the right consumer with the right business person for a useful pre or post sales conversation. For businesses that have significantly invested in digital, AI is a must to help you become recession-resistant”—Jim Kaskade, CEO, Conversica
“Healthcare professionals tell us they are consistently pressed for time, experience continual information overload and face administrative demands that reduce face-to-face time with patients. These pressures result in decreased job satisfaction and likely lower the quality of care. We see AI power ‘tools’ in 2020 allowing clinicians to improve process and operations, and enable clinical decision making in less time, with fewer resources”—Kevin King, CEO, iRhythm
“There will be a greater involvement of AI in the creative process, especially in the media and advertising industry in 2020. This will include creative content generation, analysis of expected user engagement and potentially, pricing of media and content. These developments in AI will have a significant impact on content creation and the creative industry in 2020 and beyond”—Ian Anderson, VP of AI, InMobi Group
“Many organizations will struggle to translate their AI investments into business success due to insufficient resources and expertise to support data initiatives, difficulty accessing siloed data, and an increased urgency for fast analysis and delivery. The fate of AI will depend on AI itself—advancements in automated data and delivery systems in the coming decade will help businesses increase their success rates in these AI and big data initiatives across industries”—Sean Knapp, Founder and CEO, Ascend
“Retail businesses are beginning to transform using data and AI to streamline operations and enhance the customer experience. We will see an influx of retailers using AI tools such as recommendation services and predictive analytics to compete with the data-native, e-commerce juggernauts. Retailers can use AI to access real-time insights into the state of the store and intelligence to see how products are moving on and off the shelf. This unprecedented visibility will guide merchandising, drive replenishment tasks, and transform a retailer’s supply chain, ultimately improving the customer experience”—Sarjoun Skaff, CTO, Bossa Nova Robotics
“Over the past several years, AI has changed how we develop software and unlock new approaches to solving problems, which has had a ripple effect across verticals. The oil and gas industry in particular, once associated with an archaic technology infrastructure, is on the cusp of a paradigm shift in how it will tap AI’s ability to re-imagine automation and workflows that underpin business processes across today's energy landscape. In 2020, more and more energy companies will enlist the help of AI-backed software to optimize their operations and data quality while also increasing productivity and efficiency”—Tyson Greer, Chief Product Officer, Quorum Software
“In 2020, we will see a shift across the enterprise, where companies will embrace technology to help augment and support human abilities on an individual level. Personalized AI coaches will soon be a reality at all professional levels, offering in-the-moment guidance when it’s needed most to improve behavior. Human performance matters, but it can vary greatly; this is where AI-driven technology can help, detecting when individuals are stressed or fatigued, providing real-time guidance to help them be better, more consistent versions of themselves”—Joshua Feast, Co-Founder and CEO, Cogito
“Geopolitical events such as trade wars, Brexit, and political unrest in other regions will have major impacts on supply chains in 2020. This will put pressure on supply chains to optimize processes and to be an engine for innovation and growth. Technologies such as AI, IoT, machine learning and predictive analytics can not only provide additional levels of real-time visibility, but will also enable companies to identify new business models”—Richard Howells, Vice President, SAP Digital Supply Chain
"2020 will be a pivotal year for AI to find its place in health systems. AI will empower physicians to deliver quality care and to streamline monotonous pre- and post-care protocols. AI also provides a foundation to return healthcare to a patient-centric, empathetic experience; one where AI assistants will help patients navigate an otherwise overwhelming system and receive quality, efficient care"—Pascal Zuta, CEO, GYANT
“In 2020, we’ll see data scientists continuously evaluate ML performance and train ML fraud models. However, most retailers will take a blended approach, balancing manual and automated fraud review, as even the best ML today still generates an unacceptable number of false-positive declines”—KC Fox, SVP Technology Services, Radial
“In healthcare, 2020 will prove consequential for AI in ways that may not be understood for years. We will see the slow-motion collision of privacy concerns with potential consumer benefit along complex and sophisticated dimensions that the media and public are not ready to process. An already difficult dialogue will be complicated by the gradual realization that simple approaches to privacy, such as so-called ‘de-identification,’ are far from fool-proof in privacy yet critical to the generation of crucial clinical insights”—Frank Ingari, President, Tandigm Health
“Using AI for pattern recognition is where we are today (still in its infancy), but organizations need much more information to stand behind an AI-based decision, including understanding the cause and effect of an action being taken. This will be incredibly important and borderline essential in highly regulated industries that want to leverage AI to help derive insights. Expect a heavy focus on this throughout the next year and beyond, especially with their being such a high focus from all businesses around analytics democratization and end-user self-service”—Mike Leone, Senior Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG)
“AI will finally become relevant in the workplace and flip the employee experience on its head. Virtual assistants will serve up the intelligence we need, when and where we need it to get work done and deliver it to our phones, tablets and even wearables in personalized work feeds that much like the newsfeeds we use to curate and simplify our lives at home, will organize and guide us through our days, eliminate time-sucking tasks that frustrate and distract us, and allow us to focus on the meaningful work we want and are paid to do”—Steve Wilson, VP of Product, Cloud and IoT, Citrix Systems
“Workplace experiences will improve greatly as the use of AI accelerates across different departments and functions; for example, sales teams will have real-time recommendations to help them close deals, and recruiters will be able to streamline matching candidates with the right jobs. However, we will also see the impact of imperfect models, such as strong candidates being ignored due to biased keyword preferences. To prevent this, companies need to invest in systems for AI ethics to ensure they identify and address bias in their machine learning models”—Meg Bear, Head of Product, SAP SuccessFactors
“Many business users think it’s hard to get machine learning models into production, but the math itself is nowhere near the hardest part of an AI implementation. The biggest challenge most teams will contend with in 2020 is the data: connecting it together from various systems, normalizing it, and cleansing it. Solving these data issues will be the key to AI success at scale”—Tom Wentworth, SVP Product Marketing, Acquia
“The demand for AIOps in the enterprise will continue to rise. Due to an expansion in the number of workloads—both in the public cloud and on-premises and an increase in application complexity—investment in AIOps will increase and ultimately lead to better business outcomes. Today’s challenges place a premium on differentiated vendor solutions powered by AI/ML and big data analytics techniques that can help modern IT operations evolve from traditional monitoring and observability to actionability”—Ram Chakravarti, CTO, BMC
“Businesses will increasingly leverage machine learning as more and more data is collected through IoT sensors, edge devices and cloud sources. AI will morph into ‘Practical AI’, becoming more useful in everyday life through its ability to uncover patterns and infer the unexpected, resulting in positive outcomes. Practical AI strengthens the trust people have in it, shining a light on dark data and leading to decisions that can positively affect our lives and businesses”—Jeff Reser, AI/HPC Strategy, SUSE
“In 2020, Hollywood will undoubtedly increase its use of AI in the creative process to create and deliver the right content to the right audience, allowing Hollywood to better estimate interest and demand. On the production front, AI will help identify nuances in data, even the most nominal differences in appeal to audiences when it comes to story line, genre and things like color and light palettes. If used as a tool and not as pure substitution for human talent, AI will play a fascinating role over the next ten years, changing the way producers and directors bring their own creativity to the screen”—Darcy Antonellis, Head of Amdocs Media and CEO of Vubiquity
“AI-Assisted Development will come of age and become a part of everyday developers’ workflow, even if in subtle but meaningful ways. Whether accelerating pros, guiding beginners or supporting in code, architecture and quality analysis, the more modern development tools will begin augmenting developers with the expertise automatically learned from data, enabling increased productivity and quality”—António Alegria, Head of Artificial Intelligence, OutSystems
“Validated by a rapidly expanding pool of proof points across verticals, customer experience (CX) AI solutions will quickly evolve, and specific silos of data within the contact center will be combined with data sources across the enterprise to deliver more accurate and impactful results. CX-focused companies will realize that this flexibility and integration with a wider suite of AI solutions is key to their success”—Dejan Deklich, Chief Product Officer at 8x8
“Responding to increasing customer pressures, in 2020, retailer’s use of AI in the supply chain will be vital as retailers push to meet customer expectations around omni-channel fulfillment, one- or two-day shipping, and seamless return experiences. To improve their responsiveness and agility, retailers will use AI to drive product assortment and product development to help identify specific product styles and attributes that consumers are seeking that might otherwise be overlooked by human assortment planners and designers”—Sue Welch, CEO, Bamboo Rose
“In 2020, the spotlight will continue to shine on transparency. But for AI to work the way its intended, it needs good data—garbage in, garbage out. In the next year, businesses will look more closely at what data is available and how they can leverage it in a way that not only benefits business operations, but also prioritizes accountability and addressability across all lines of business”—Jeremy Steinberg, Global Head of Ecosystem, MediaMath
“AI is in a unique position in 2020 to overhaul the approach to social advertising. With global marketers looking to deploy targeted and relevant ads around the world, AI can be used to understand engagement and delivery patterns to indicate what creative is resonating, which formats are performing well, and when to deliver ads to specific audience subsets. 2020 is set to be the most impactful year yet for social advertising”—Tuomo Riekki, Founder and CPO, Smartly.io
“In 2020, we will see use of automation and AI continue to evolve for customer service entities. Customers’ ‘routine’ and simple service asks are either being handled by automated solutions or customers are handling them themselves, thanks to improved conversational self-service. By recognizing and analyzing human emotions, AI technology will help the service representatives connect with the customer on a deeper level and resolve the complex issues more effectively”—Chris Bauserman, VP of Segment and Product Marketing, NICE inContact
“In 2020, healthcare organizations will look to leverage new tools to provide a better standard of care and we’ll see many turn to new technologies to improve their day-to-day operations through the use of voice-controlled and patient-facing healthcare applications, remote patient monitoring solutions, and tools that provide a deeper, more real-time sentiment analysis”—Robin Cavanaugh, CTO, GetWellNetwork
“As the autonomous car becomes more of a reality, companies are realizing the concept of the Autonomous Enterprise, where smart machines run the company from end to end. In 2020, we will see companies looking at the “P” in RPA, as they better understand, rethink and simplify their business processes before RPA and AI can take over. Process mining, modeling and simulation will experience massive adoption next year, paving the way for a more autonomous enterprise”—Dr. Gero Decker, Co-Founder and CEO, Signavio
“AI technology has progressed at such a high pace, it has now leapfrogged where machine learning has taken us. So now we will see more instances of high-cost development industries acquiring AI capabilities like ONTAP AI that will fix these cost structures, while giving the speed for new development. For example, a pharmaceutical company may develop a custom drug that would normally have been too timely and costly to produce, but how AI can be smartly deployed to reduce high costs using predictive model. It will be AI helping AI”—Jason Carolan, Chief Innovation Officer, Flexential
“Consumers are quite adept at tuning out generic ads that have no real connection to them. But as ‘data lakes’ get larger and larger, it will be easier to train AI to personalize customer experiences digitally, especially within social media feeds. This will cross over into businesses as organizations begin to accumulate accurate internal data to train AI functions in secured enterprise clouds. Those who get in front of this trend, will be in a stronger position to generate and feed data to their AI-enabled software”—Patrick Welch, President and CMO, Bigtincan
“Over the next 12 to 24 months, digital therapy technologies that harness personalized AI sourced directly from patients in their everyday lives, will improve patient outcomes, promote patient engagement and experiences, and will facilitate healthcare delivery decisions that are closer aligned with and have greater influence over patient behavior. 2020 will mark a healthcare evolution, with patients more actively participating in their healthcare through digital therapeutic companions embedded with AI, to personally guide and deliver healthcare outcomes”—Omri Shor, Co-Founder and CEO, Medisafe
“2020 will be all about practical AI in the workplace. Enterprise assistance will advance to a whole new level of sophistication, enabling knowledge and insights to be pulled from unstructured data and search to become voice-enabled, fulfilling user intent rather than just executing on simple keyword searches”—Gillian McCann, Head of Cloud Engineering and Artificial Intelligence, Workgrid Software
“In 2020 and beyond, successful organizations will no longer rely on AI and machine learning for one-time, one-dimensional projects. Instead, it will always be running behind the scenes, with several in-line analytics models embedded and driving real-time decisioning for personalized engagement with customers. To power these models, businesses will place a greater emphasis on having more, quality data”—George Corugedo, Co-Founder and CTO, RedPoint
“AI and machine learning will continue to augment human capabilities in the healthcare field by efficiently analyzing data and tracking patterns, but without replacing the empathetic human touch. Predictive analytics will continue to play a significant role in the future, allowing us to predict patient complications, like falls or readmission, before they even happen. In 2020, we expect to see more organizations capitalize on AI to monitor patient behavior, creating a safer environment and truly making a difference in empowered care”—Mike Wessinger, CEO, PointClickCare
“In 2020, Digital Transformation will not be possible without cloud adoption because Big Data, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are all interrelated and made possible via the cloud. While talent is still lacking in AI/ML skills, many of today’s large tech companies offer guidance or free AI education to ensure ease of use and AI adoption”—John Samuel, EVP, CGS
“The full promise of AI has yet to be fulfilled, but at the same time, it is on the verge of a major breakthrough. Parallels can be drawn to when smartphones entered the mass consumer market and it took time for developers to establish design patterns and figure out what would and wouldn’t work when creating apps. 2020 will be the year in which we start to firmly establish best practices around how AI can be applied to general business problems, leading to a wave of efficiencies for the consumers of business software”—Forrest Zeisler, Co-Founder and CTO, Jobber
“Using AI to offer more personalized customer experiences at scale is one of the top priorities for brands across the globe, and conversational AI is expected to have a big moment in 2020. Not only will we see many more enterprises use AI in customer-facing applications such as chatbots and contact centers, we’re also going to see more AI involved in data analytics”—Jack Mardack, VP, Actian
“In 2020, we’re going to see increased public demand for the demystification and democratisation of AI. Increasing public understanding of AI, and actively seeking to hear people’s hopes and concerns, is the only way forward to ensure that the role of AI is both seen as a force for good for everyone in our society”—Teg Dosanjh, Director of Connected Living, Samsung UK and Ireland
“Most people are not aware that the technologies that make recommendations, feed ideas or help with decision-making are subject to algorithmic bias. In 2020, a major AI provider will be exposed for accidentally providing detrimental information due to the existence of algorithmic bias”—Rajesh Ganesan, VP, ManageEngine
“In 2020, artificial intelligence will drastically change how consumers manage their healthcare finances, delivering the most value for every dollar spent or saved. As consumers use their employer-provided benefit accounts to pay for qualified expenses, they will be met with personalized support that guides them to make smart and informed decisions. AI is the only technology that is adequate to analyze the massive data sets it takes to really ‘know’ each consumer and offer them the best and most personalized recommendations to meet their needs”—Steven Auerbach, CEO, Alegeus
“2020 will bring some transformative changes to the healthcare market through AI, as these technologies such as digital assistants and chatbots hold significant opportunity to improve the patient experience through more simplified and personalized processes. These innovations also have the potential to reduce operational costs for companies by bringing intelligent automation to the payment and billing issues that patients commonly have”—Clayton Bain, Founder and CEO, Salucro
“In 2020-2021, AI will make it possible for 3D scanners to recognize and understand geometric shapes and what material a surface is made of. This will make 3D scanning even easier for users, as the device begins to do a lot more than just capture 2D and 3D data. We will also see improved color capture for CGI, AR/VR and e-commerce, since 3D scanning is becoming an increasingly important aspect in these industries, making it faster and easier to make hyper-realistic graphics”—Andrei Vakulenko, Chief Business Development Officer, Artec 3D
“In 2020, businesses will extend and accelerate output of existing intelligent technologies such as AI, by applying them to different business operations and integrating them with one another. For instance, AI will disrupt the manual, error-prone process of managing vendor contracts by automating the process and applying intelligent algorithms. And, AI will be integrated fully into the supplier management process, helping identify high-risk suppliers before purchases are made, to ensure suppliers are financially, environmentally and ethically sustainable”—Drew Hofler, VP of Portfolio Marketing, SAP Ariba and SAP Fieldglass
“The application of and dependency on AI to enable operational and economic benefit will be balanced by the need for direct human stewardship in order to engender consumer trust. This will normalize the technology cost curve advantage”—Cali Tran, President and CEO, Valassis
“In 2020, AI and machine learning will become more embedded into applications as a core component of business process flow. We’ll see a transformation from business process management of the past to intelligent business process management (IBPM). With conversational AI and robotic process automation embedded directly into business process flow, all users will look at processes and be empowered to modify them to become more efficient. As a result, we can expect simplified workflows and an overall increase in productivity”—Gunther Rothermel, EVP and Head, SAP Cloud Platform
“In 2020, we’ll see conversations increase around the role of technology in society, including beginning to explore effective ways to achieve digital literacy so that all technology stakeholders—government, vendors and consumers—can start to make judgement calls on how much (or little) innovative technology like artificial intelligence should be regulated”—Jason Tan, Co-Founder and CEO, Sift
“Machine learning and AI will continue to be oversold and under-delivered in 2020. These terms have been used interchangeably over the last several years, and they will continue to be conflated. The key to implementing an effective automation strategy in 2020 will be selecting the right processes internally to automate and maximize ROI”—Greg Betz, SVP of Data Intelligence and Automation, NTT DATA Services
“To stay competitive, brands will adopt technology that detects changes to items' search position, content, inventory levels, reviews, pricing, and profitability, and trigger the appropriate actions to meet desired outcomes like preserving margins and grow sales. We're already starting to see this development with AI technology that programmatically bids on Amazon sponsored keywords to improve advertising efficiency, like what’s already been widely adopted by many brands for Google. While humans won't be obsolete, without technology, they won't be as effective or efficient”—Keith Anderson, SVP Strategy and Insights, Profitero
“In 2020, AI becomes a dinner table conversation in households, because of the power it has and its incredible potential to improve the quality of life, along with its potential abuses and privacy concerns. The societal implications of AI will become part of the debate, perhaps even for the American presidency”—Brad Schoening, Principal Architect, Privitar
“The pervasive use of AI and ML in business is revolutionizing professions such as legal, accounting, healthcare and education by democratizing access to data and expert services. AI is extending customization and personalized services to a broad base of customers through low-cost intelligent agents. Overall, AI will illuminate intelligence hidden in systems, empower consumers and complement professional expertise”—Dan Hushon, CTO, DXC Technology
“We’ll see more enterprise and businesses leverage AI tools and automated communication to better understand the entire customer journey. As consumers become more comfortable interacting with AI agents, Natural Language Processing (NLP) will become more accurate and advanced and implementation will expand”—Jay Gurudevan, Principal Product Manager, Twilio
“The demand for AI solutions will continue to outpace the availability of AI talent, and businesses will adapt by enabling more applications to be developed by non-AI professionals, resulting in the socialization of the process. Non-AI practitioners, such as knowledge workers and analysts, who are not skilled AI practitioners (but have great domain expertise), will start to develop rudimentary applications aided by automated AI engines”—John LaRocca, Managing Director, Europe/NA Operations, Fractal Analytics
“AI is driving a shift away from technical ‘specialists’ when it comes to the source of innovation. Champions of AI are coming from all parts of the organization: strategy, research, marketing, sales and IT. These new AI champions are ‘integrators,’ stepping beyond their job descriptions to risk bringing new pieces together to drive innovation”—Anil Kaul, CEO, Absolutdata
“Going forward, we’ll no longer require massive big data sets to train AI algorithms. In the past, data scientists have always needed large amounts of data to perform accurate inferences with AI models. Advances in AI are allowing us to achieve similar results with far less data”—Girish Mysore, CTO, Zinier
“Using AI to automate does make operations far more efficient, but the notion that organizations can leverage cloud services and AI to eliminate all IT operations is a pipe dream. The NoOps trend reminds me of a time 5-8 years ago when people thought the cloud would be the panacea for everything. Instead, it’s clear that a hybrid model has won out with the cloud becoming ideal for many apps but others remaining best left on-premises”—Kunal Agarwal, CEO, Unravel Data
“Enterprise AI is witnessing a shift from a research-oriented mindset to a product mindset that allows it to have a cross functional impact at a much broader scope. Chief administration officers are now increasingly viewing AI investments from the lens of outcomes, ownership, cost, team structure and revenue. As it is already happening in some of the data-native industries such as ecommerce and fintech, the democratization of AI is bound to become pervasive”—Saurav Chakravorty, Principal Data Scientist, Brillio
“In the coming year, we’ll begin to see AI play a bigger role in helping people and companies unlock the intelligence contained in their most critical documents, extracting meaning that can be searched, analyzed, and incorporated into digital workflows”—Mark Grilli, Vice President of Product Marketing, Adobe
“AI’s next frontier will address the human mind’s blind spots with AI-driven ideation—bypassing human biases and cognitive bottlenecks. In 2020, we will see machines acquire the ability to produce millions of creative ideas through AI-powered problem solving. AI will enable machines to comprehend the thousands of scientific articles and patents published every day, connect the dots between disparate events and various data sources, and discover novel patterns buried in complex data. This empowers decision-makers with disruptive and actionable insights, while accelerating our global quest to solve the world’s more complex challenges”—Sagie Davidovich, Co-Founder and CEO, SparkBeyond
“As companies start to fully utilize the data they own, 2020 will see the rise of hybrid data management. Combining data governance with artificial intelligence, hybrid data management tools enable companies to realize the value of their data, while keeping it secure along the full lifecycle”—Markus Noga, SVP Cloud Platform Business Services, SAP
“While many recent reports state ‘the end’ of the drone VC bubble, we believe this space will once again pick up speed in 2020. We are only now finally unlocking the true potential for drones by putting together the appropriate regulation for fully-automated flights. 2020 is also gearing up to be the year when many large enterprises are moving beyond the trial phase into full commercial adoption of drones within their complex workflows”—Gen Tsuchikawa, Chief Innovation Officer, Sony Innovation Fund
