According to Gartner, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) industry is going to be worth US$1.2 trillion in 2018, with an impressive 70% increase from 2017. The market growth will be driven by improved customer experience, new revenue generation and cost reduction by companies.

Through technologies like Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Virtual agents, Chatbots, etc., simple customer care operations and requests will be set in motion at a much faster rate this year. Even minor league IT companies are now venturing into AI software designed to reduce mundane human tasks and replace former almost-redundant technologies. For instance, AI can take over simple tasks from call centers offering customer care helplines, thus reducing major costs for them. With cost reduction and improved AI, new revenue will be generated for existing as well as new products and services.

Powerful Market Value Forecast

Back in 2017, the AI market value was around US$700 billion. Within just a period of a year, it is now reckoned to achieve a significant increase in its growth. Experts suggest an estimated business value growth of up to US$3.9 trillion by 2022.

The graph explains how AI's worth was well below a trillion dollars in 2017 and is estimated to reach $1.2 trillion in 2018. This will be followed by a steep exponential growth within the next three years where AI has the potential to generate US$3.9 trillion worth of business value. Although there will be a steep increase in AI's present market value, Gartner suggests a gradual yearly percentage decrease in the growth of AI business value from one year to another. Following graph shows a gradual decline in the Percentage-Increase of AI market value from 2018 to 2022.

Now, the percentage growth for 2018 from 2017 is estimated to be around 70%. But in a span of few years, the same percentage growth for 2022 will drop to 17% from 2021. This slowdown is associated with all emerging technologies and it means no harm to AI's successful application and steady business growth.

Investments in AI

With the high estimate that Gartner has provided us with, the UK Government is driving an industrial strategy to tap into the growing technology. The UK plans to invest US$1.3 billion in AI. This news was captured right after Gartner's estimations on Wednesday, April 25th, 2018. The UK Government plans to remodel and transform a whole lot of sectors – transportation, infrastructure, renewable energy and also dealing with its aging population.

Tech Giants such as Amazon (with Alexa), Google (who bought the AI startup Deepmind), Microsoft (funding Element AI) and Uber (acquired Geometric Intelligence) have already been investing and dealing with AI tech since 2011. Apple is no stranger to AI – In 2016 it acquired the AI startup Emotient, which deals with facial recognition technology and customer care ads.

On a Concluding Note

With paramount boosts in investments coming from all directions, AI has never been a hotter commodity than before. But as Uncle Ben often says, "With Great Power comes Great Responsibility", so we need to be more prepared than before and not end up with nightmarish scenarios that creators and writers often come up with – take Terminator and the more recent Black Mirror anthology TV series for example. The fate of AI is still in our hands and we better not move it to the Other Side – a Darker Side.