2016 was a year for many innovations and technical developments. Artificial intelligence and machine learning had a major role to play in these innovations and technologies. Major developments and offerings came out of Microsoft (Cognitive Services), Google (TensorFlow), Amazon (Rekognition, Polly, Lex), IBM (Watson), Salesforce (Einstein), and many more. Artificial Intelligence and its other variations are expected to proliferate in the enterprise in 2017. All the IT companies including today’s leading technology companies have been investing huge amounts for resources in this field. The advancements made by AI in 2016 have shown the great amount of potential it has to change the future completely.
Companies like Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft share their research in AI to advance developments in the space. These moves from the topmost IT companies also meet collective interests of researchers and scientists. Facebook CEO Zuckerberg spent about 100 hours building “Jarvis” and concluded that even if he spent another 1,000 hours on the project, he still wouldn’t be able to build a system that could learn new skills on its own. Zuckerberg’s experience also reinforced his prediction that AI systems will be more accurate at reading senses than the human nervous system within a decade.
Google invests more in than any other company in AI. Artificial Intelligence is used in every innovation google comes up with. One remarkable project is Google’s self-driving car project, now a separate company called Waymo. Google has already assured to use deep reinforcement learning this year to make its data centers more efficient. But the approach remains experimental, and it still requires time-consuming simulation, so it’ll be interesting to see how effectively it can be deployed.
It’s certainly easy to predict that artificial intelligence and deep learning will have a major impact on the tech market in 2017, but it’s not necessarily easy to know exactly where the biggest benefits from these technologies will occur. The clear early leaders are applications involving image recognition and processing (often called machine vision), which includes everything from populating names onto photos posted to social media, to assisted- and autonomous-driving features in connected cars.
Natural-language processing algorithms are also essential elements for chatbots and other types of automated assistance systems that are bound to get significantly more popular in 2017. Many Startups are working towards progress in this field. These AI based system products and chatbots provide customer assistance and technical support in the customer service industry, intelligent tutoring systems in the educational industry, HealthCare bots in the healthcare Industry and Virtual sales representative in the marketing industry. These startups show a great zeal and enthusiasm in their research and innovation. One such remarkable product is Inforobo.
From Gartner’s view the next stepping stone for AI will be Intelligent Things. Intelligent things, as they evolve, will shift from the standard IOT devices to a collaborative model in which things communicate with each other and act in concert to accomplish tasks. Also, virtual and augmented reality will be used for training scenarios and experiences.
With the progress made by the IT industry in the 2016 with the help of AI, it’s clear that there is an expectation that the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning platforms will proliferate in 2017 across multiple business, social and government spheres. This will be supported with advanced tools and capabilities like virtual reality and augmented reality.