Trending Now: AI, 5G, Data and Analytics

A recent IDC report calls artificial intelligence (AI) “inescapable.”

Key drivers include boosts in time to market, enhanced product innovation and improved customer satisfaction.

MuleSoft research predicts a 95% growth in the adoption of AI “Machine learning (ML), basic task automation and virtual agents/chatbots are the most common use cases of AI,” they say, and anticipate that 25% percent of "customer service operations will be using virtual customer assistants.”

AI is inevitable because it’s essential to survival. Genpact predicts that within five years “AI-driven enterprises will be up to 10 times more efficient and hold twice the market share of those that don’t adopt the technology.”

The why behind these predictions lies in AI’s unprecedented power to drive other processes and technologies. In a sense, AI isn’t digital transformation (DX) per se. It’s what makes digital transformation possible.

You’ve probably read a great deal lately about Big Data, 5G and dramatic enhancements in analytics. These technologies are as transformative as you’ve heard and artificial intelligence is the engine that makes them go.

AI Transforms Big Data Into Big Intelligence

Ankur Laroia, managing director at BDO Houston, notes that we’ve been seeing “increasing volume, velocity, and variety of data” for some time. “The amount of data that needs to be stored doubles every six months, and it’s increasingly in unstructured formats that make it difficult to integrate and synthesize into something meaningful.” [emphasis added]

Meanwhile, the profusion of cheap storage increases the temptation to hoard data, which in the absence of processing horsepower generates confusion, not clarity. As any number of researchers and theorists have made clear, data isn’t information, information isn’t knowledge and knowledge isn’t wisdom: data is only useful when it can be converted into higher orders of intelligence.

AI analyzes far more data than humans can (and it does so far more rapidly). It identifies patterns and relationships in datasets that humans might miss and in doing so sparks process improvements and innovation.

Ultimately artificial intelligence dramatically enhances an organization’s ability to transform raw data into actionable intelligence. Businesses without this capability will be at an existential disadvantage versus AI-driven competitors.

Solving the 5G “Problem”

2020 is the year 5G, the next wave of mobile communication technology, is expected to explode. The ISACA explains that 5G “will be driven by speed, quality of service, reliability and so much more that it can do to transform the current way we use the internet and its related services.”

Its promise, though, hinges on AI. While 5G accelerates cloud services by effectively bringing users into closer proximity to the cloud, artificial intelligence provides the processing power to drive customization and innovation.

From an operational and developmental perspective 5G actually poses problems, and AI is the solution.

Analytics

ZDNet puts it simply: “Unlocking and analyzing data is at the heart of digital transformation.”

As noted above re: 5G, data is of no value in and of itself. Organizations investing in analytics must also invest in AI and machine learning in order to process the data required to make the analytics work. The reason is straightforward: AI processes massive amounts of data in real time without human intervention.

An example most of us are familiar with illustrates the point. When shopping online, we’ve grown accustomed to sites showing us results that are directly relevant to what we’re searching for at the moment (or have searched for recently). Further, the experience stays with us as we move from site to site and platform to platform.

Expect AI-driven analytics to improve more and more in coming years as predictive analytics get better at interpreting and anticipating our behavior. Also, expect the same sorts of real-time insights to further penetrate the physical retail environment and the logistic/supply chain.

In other words, AI isn’t necessarily the thing in and of itself. Instead, it’s the thing that makes other things happen. And because of its rapid evolution and dramatically increasing applicability, many other things are going to be happening in the coming years.