Gartner has identified the latest trends that will rule the next generation, an impressive list which includes continuous intelligence, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) and augmented analytics having significant disruptive potential over the next three to five years.

Data and Analytics leaders must examine the potential business impact of the changing trends to adjust their business models and operations accordingly else they will be at risk losing competitive advantage to those who do, echoes Rita Sallam, research vice president at Gartner.

Rita further adds that the story of data and analytics is evolving ranging from supporting internal decision making to information products, appointing chief data officers and continuous intelligence. In this technology dominated age, it's critical to gain a deeper understanding of the technology trends that fuel this evolving story and prioritizes them based on business value.

Donald Feinberg, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner says that too much data is the very challenge created by the digital disruption leading to additional unprecedented opportunity. This vast amount of data, together with increasingly powerful processing capabilities that are enabled by the cloud, throws unprecedented opportunities which make it possible to train and execute algorithms at a large scale necessary to harness the full potential of AI.

Donald says at the end, the continued survival of any business will eventually depend upon an agile, data-centric architecture responding to the constant rate of change. Here is how Augmented Analytics and Explainable AI (XAI) will be so dominant in 2019 and beyond:

Augmented Analytics and its Potential to Disrupt

Augmented analytics is the next wave of disruption deploying AI techniques and machine learning (ML) to transform how analytics content is consumed, developed, and shared. Augmented analytics is a boom to an organisation relieving a company's prior dependence on data scientists through the use of advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms.

•  Augmented analytics analyses an organisation's exhaustive data combinations, to pinpoint which factors are truly influencing output parameters.

•  Augmented analytics allows business users to get explanations behind a particular actionable insight in a matter of seconds.

•  Actionable Analytics gives actionable insights to propel up the business. Ultimately, augmented analytics simplifies the data analysis process for organisations to gain significant insights into their data to strategize business decisions.

Brand Value of Augmented Analytics

According to the Augmented Analytics Market by Software, Service (Training and Consulting, Deployment and Integration, and Support and Maintenance), Organization Size (SMEs and Large Enterprises), Deployment Type, Vertical, and Region – Global Forecast to 2023, the global augmented analytics market is projected to grow from USD 4.8 billion in 2018 to USD 18.4 billion by 2023, growing at a CAGR of 30.6%.

In the years to come, the growth in cloud-based technologies will propel the use of augmented analytics solutions, like SaaS, by companies looking for cost-effective functionalities. The developed countries, such as the US and Canada, will be on the top pedestal in terms of adopting new and emerging technologies. Salesforce (US), SAP (Germany), IBM (US), Microsoft (US), Oracle (US), Tableau (US), MicroStrategy (US), SAS (US), Qlik (US), TIBCO Software (US), Sisense (US), Information Builders (US), Yellowfin (Australia), ThoughtSpot (US), and Domo (US) will be the major vendors offering augmented analytics software and services across the globe in 2019 and beyond.

By 2020, augmented analytics is all poised to become a dominant factor driving new purchases of analytics and BI, in addition to data science and ML platforms.

The Attention to Explainable AI (XAI)

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a transformational $15 trillion opportunity which has caught the attention of all tech users, leaders and influencers. Yet, as AI becomes more sophisticated, the algorithmic 'black box' dominates more to make all the decisions. To have a confident outcome and stakeholder trust with an ultimate aim to capitalise on the opportunities, it is essential to know the rationale of how the algorithm arrived at its recommendation or decision, the basic premise behind Explainable AI (XAI).

XAI is an emerging branch of Artificial Intelligence where AI systems are made to explain the reasoning behind every decision made by them, a technology that will be imperative if future war-fighters are to understand, appropriately trust, and effectively manage the new age team of artificially intelligent machine partners.

Nvidia the global leader in designing graphics processing units is working to open this black box to unveil the secrets behind AI. It has developed a way to visually highlight how the technology is arriving at decisions. A recent published paper explains that the neural network architecture developed by Nvidia's researchers is designed to highlight the areas of a video picture which contribute most strongly to the behaviour of a self-driving car's deep neural network. The results are equally remarkable as it shows that the network is focusing on the lane markings, parked cars and edges of roads basically just the sort of things that a good human driver would want to pay attention to.

Thus, the Explainable AI (XAI) technology aims to create offerings on machine learning techniques that:

•  Develop more explainable models while maintaining a high level of learning performance, i.e prediction accuracy.

•  Enable human users to understand, trust, and manage the emerging generation of artificially intelligent partners that will dominate the enterprise space.

Brand Value of XAI

XAI holds immense market potential and brand value for 2019 and beyond. Functional domains of Compliance, Transparency, and Ethical use of data hold the highest brand value for XAI in the coming years. XAI enable a business to meet compliance requirements immediately, even for their own algorithms if needed.

Looking into the Future

2019 and beyond hold immense promise for augmented analytics, by automating insight generation, augmented analytics relieves a company's dependence on data scientists through the use of advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms. Augmented Analytics can access an organisation's data, clean it, analyse it, and convert the insights into actionable intelligence for the marketers with little to no technical supervision, saving huge monetary investments made to acquire data scientists.

Explainable AI is highly transparent as it eliminates the concern that the organisation is hiding or is unaware of how the machine comes to a critical decision. XAI ensures that data is ethically used by organisations with an auditable and logical way to defend their decisions as being fair.

The greater is the confidence in the AI, the faster and more widely it can be deployed across organisations. These two disruptive technologies will reshape business to catapult on a stronger position to foster innovation and move ahead of its competitors in developing and adopting new generation capabilities.

As the technology market is growing, this is just a beginning to an analytics revolution 2.0, are you ready to witness a technology history being created?