Artificial intelligence will be more dominant in redefining businesses and customer experiences.

AI or artificial intelligence (AI) either promises transformational positive changes for the social good or threatens its very existence to supplant humanity in the most malignant way! Moving forward to a new year in a few months, Analytics Insights bring the top 10 Artificial Intelligence (AI) trends to watch out for in 2021.

• Making way for IPA (Intelligent Process Automation)

Forrester estimates that about 25 percent of Fortune 500 companies want to invest and implement intelligent process automation (IPA) processes. IPA characterized as a cousin to RPA adds up to automate specific tasks with artificial intelligence. The more machine learning algorithms sort data, the more AI recognises it for intelligent processing. OCR technology is an instance where AI works with traditional RPA to read unstructured data stored in scanned documents. Expect to witness more AI-infused RPA wonders in 2021

• AI-enabled chips will boost performance

Regarded as the latest trend, AI-Enabled chips are expected to reach a revenue of US$91,185 million in 2025, a huge growth from US$6,638 million in 2018. AI-enabled chips will steadfast applications that require AI such as object detection, computer vision, facial recognition, natural language processing much faster. NVIDIA, Qualcomm and AMD are creating AI-enabled chips that will boost the performance of AI applications. Qualcomm has already launched its new AI-enabled Snapdragon 732G to improve High-Tier Mobile Gaming.

• The Evolution of Data Highways

Data would grow by leaps and bounds, and for businesses to remain competitive, enterprises must seek to adopt advanced analytics, and adapt dynamic business models. They must establish specialist data science teams and rethink their overall strategies to keep pace with the competition.

• AI for Cybersecurity and data breaches

Data will become more accessible, and so will be hacking, phishing attacks! Circa, 2021 and beyond AI and advanced prediction algorithms will play a decisive role in cybersecurity. AI would contribute to cybercrime prevention while enhancing enterprise cybersecurity measures. AI-powered cybersecurity would be used to spot digital activity or transactions that follow nefarious patterns to raise preventive alarms before defences can be breached and sensitive data compromised.

• The emergence of a Hybrid workforce

Post Covid-19 pandemic is curtailed, organizations will jump into the RPA bandwagon which means swiftly implementing cognitive AI and RPA to handle high-volume, repetitive tasks. As more and more use cases emerge, the modern workplace will shift to a hybrid workforce environment. The human workforce will collaborate with automated bots, a beginning has been made already with Alexa, Siri, and other digital assistants. In 2021 and beyond, this trend would mean more collaborative interactions with AI, maybe even without knowing it.

• AI-based monitoring for business processes

Hyper automation coupled with cognitive automation projects would penetrate more into a business helping them to integrate AI-enabled tools that redefine how business processes would function in real-time. AI-enabled process and content intelligence technologies in the years to come will provide digital workers with the imperative skills they need to deal with to automate natural language, reasoning, judgment, establishing context, and providing data-driven insights.

• Automated machine learning and the rise of Data Scientists

Organizations are shifting towards automated machine learning, allowing even non-experts to use Machine Learning algorithms and techniques. Tools like Google Cloud AutoML which pave the way for citizen data scientists will become more popular in the future. These tools would help data-driven enterprises to enable customization as required without having to know the complex workflow of Machine Learning in detail. Most businesses would implement real-life experiments in all business processes and would turn their focus to cloud providers for their AI tools, like Amazon Web Services (AWS).

• Quantum AI will rise with Qubits

Businesses may crack the holy grail of quantum supremacy which would quantify the Qubits deployed by supercomputers. Devices like those so far developed by Google, IBM represents the next leap forward for quantum computing, opening the door to powerful machines that can help businesses provide answers to the possible outcomes to quantum computing research.

• Personalised Conversational AI

Natural Language Processing (NLP) will be personalised to understand human speech more cohesively by machines. Chatbots would understand human intent better and provide a more in-depth solution and analysis to user questions.

• The confluence of the Internet of Things with AI

AI and the Internet of Things together is a match made in technical heaven!!! These two technologies when deployed together will usher a new era for actionable insights. Sensor powered AI will bring predictive maintenance a more commonplace in manufacturing. Smart Home Devices like Google-owned Nest would become more and more popular. Studies estimate that 28% of all homes in the US could become smart homes by 2021, channelizing efficiency to next levels.