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As the new year and decade have dawned, the buzz surrounding artificial intelligence and its impact in 2020 and beyond shows no signs of slowing down.
AI has now been incorporated into the everyday life of consumers in the developed world, largely driven by the emergence of virtual assistants such as the Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant ecosystems of devices. This would not have been possible without the maturation of technologies such as voice and image recognition, which continue to mature. In 2020, emotion recognition and computer vision, which are relatively new AI technologies, will scale tremendously in implementations throughout various industries.
From healthcare to government, the AI use cases are endless. Here’s a look at what to expect in 2020 from AI in these verticals.
Healthcare
In recent years, the field of digital healthcare has become a hot topic, and it seems that this concept is poised to become common this year due in large part to AI enabling further innovations. Under the theme of prevention rather than treatment, the digital healthcare system has seen many advancements thus far, and more to follow.
For example, the evolution of AI will improve the quality of treatment for patients. In 2020, many medical images taken using MRI, CT scans, and X-rays will be diagnosed using AI. In addition, robots should be able to perform surgery efficiently and effectively, reducing the mortality rate due to surgical mistakes .
Alongside AI, 2020 will begin the quantum computing era, especially in the healthcare space. With the breakthrough quantum supremacy announcement from Google validating the technology and the subsequent launch of the service Amazon Braket in 2019, there is sure to be a new wave of entrepreneurial activity starting this year. Quantum computing technology holds a lot of promise for the healthcare industry with potential breakthroughs possible throughout the health IT stack from operations and administration to security. The hope is that perhaps one day, quantum computers could process all of the cells in a human body, compare them against data from millions of other people, accurately diagnose the type and stage of cancer, and identify the right compounded medication.
Enterprise
Businesses, large and small, will be implementing artificial intelligence solutions throughout their enterprises in 2020. The data analyst and scientist role will continue to increase in significance and they will drive more decision making in functional areas such as production, supply chain management, purchasing, finance, accounting, sales, and marketing. More companies are also investing in and hiring Chief Data Officers (CDO) to manage the abundance of data in today’s AI world.
In fact, the number of CDO positions has more than quadrupled over the past four years as the amount of data continues to rise. We expect this role will continue to rise in prominence within the C-Suite during 2020 as data drives more strategic decision making. As AI scales within organizations over the next decade, coinciding with the increase in data, there will also be improvements in tools to enhance capabilities and thus help CDOs and data analysts do their jobs more effectively. For those companies that do not employ many data scientists, AI products will augment many non-technical roles within organizations. In general, it is becoming increasingly important for enterprises to hire and train more employees who have skills and are educated in using AI technologies and tools.
Government
2020 will be another major election year in the United States, and we expect this to be the first year where AI will be used at a significant scale by a variety of individuals as well as organizations. While many may think Facebook, Twitter, and Google will be the primary enablers of this, we actually anticipate these companies to be prepared for this election cycle given the problem with fake content in 2016. We believe Time Warner Cable and 21st Century Fox (now the Walt Disney Company) may use AI to better schedule and program content as well as advertisements based on viewership at the local and national levels.
Privacy also will be an area to keep an eye on. As various organizations use data that they collect on their platforms for targeted advertisements, we need to realize that we are entrusting them with our personal data, which is a large responsibility. It’s important to remember that sensitive information needs safeguarding more than ever before.
Ultimately, governments will need to manage using more artificial intelligence solutions to help their societies’ well-being without compromising security and basic freedoms.
Mobility
The US and China will be the clear leaders in the development and implementations of AI for mobility solutions in 2020 and beyond. We expect Tesla to roll out autonomous driving capabilities in city streets for mass adoption, marking a major moment in the history of artificial intelligence. Uber is even pledging to start testing its Uber Air flying taxi service in 2020. There will be more trials and investments made in the self-driving car and electric air taxi markets in the years to come. The capabilities of AI also will start to be seen in other micro-mobility solutions this year from electric scooters to bicycles.
We anticipate that there may be some of the first micro-mobility fleets that can be summoned autonomously to locations based on demand. Furthermore, we expect to see AI technologies such as image, video, and speech recognition integrated into various solutions across the micro-mobility spectrum.
These are only a few of the many use cases to expect with AI in the years to come. 2020 will be a time of significant development thanks to these new technology advancements.