INTRODUCTION
Have you ever thought about how many different technologies recently affect our daily life? We can simplify so many tasks with latest ones. Are you lazy to clean the floor? No worries, robot can do that instead of you. Would you like to know what your customers love most of all? It’s easy! No need to make annoying surveys and dig for the emails to share it with them. Machine learning technologies will collect all data for you and enable to suggest exactly what customer could need at some certain moment. And there’s countless number of examples how recent technologies help us. However, we can classify some major technological trends shaping habits of consumers and business organizing tendencies for coming years. There are 6 major categories in these trends, which are Internet of Things, Machine Learning, Artificial Intellect, Robotics, Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) and Cloud Services. Let’s look at first three of these categories together.
1. IoT
Interesting fact: by year 2018 we will have roughly 7.7 billion inhabitants on the planet and 23.14 billion of connected devices (Internet of Things) according to Statista. Several theories suggest that by year 2025 world population should reach around 8 billion inhabitants and at the same time number of connected devices should reach 75.44 billion. Impressive, isn’t it? To imagine it better, you can check out the chart below:
Yes, you saw that correct: number of IoT connected devices is predicted to increase three times in 6-7 years period. No doubts that part of solutions will be applied for such structures like Smart home, Smart cities, healthcare, energy, manufacturing, etc. To be honest there are no boundaries as it can be used in practically any field. Not even mentioning the increasing revenue they are generating annually.
2. Machine learning (ML)
Although ML is only one subcategory of artificial intellect, it is widely applied and for all the merits up till this day and I bet you would agree that it can be analyzed as a separate field.
Would like to support your customers online? Or maybe annoyed with traffic jams in local area and thinking of how to avoid them? Machine learning based solution can become the answer to your case. It can even contribute to reducing the crime (let’s say by applying facial recognition function to identify socially inappropriate behavior).
But sometimes it can lead to rather drastic measures. Probably interesting example of that would be China’s goal to develop controversially assessed “Social credit system” program, which is expected to be completely functioning by 2020. The aim of this program is to recognize socially inappropriate behavior and eliminate it by applying some certain punishment. There are also applied rewards for being exemplary citizen. Bought too much alcohol, smoked in non-smoke area or are late to pay taxes? You can forget about purchasing domestic flight or can even get banned from getting management job position in state-owned company. You walk your dog without a leash? You risk that your beloved pet will be confiscated after few warnings. However, if you pay taxes on time, stop on crossroads giving way for pedestrians or do any other socially good things, most likely you will get discounts on energy bills or bike rent without deposit. There’s a list of punishments and rewards for each relevant action. And machine learning is one of the foundation stones in developing all this huge system.
Few years back technologies weren’t able understand human talk, and now they are advanced enough to answer our questions, recognize faces, help making diagnosis in medical cases and assist with many other daily tasks. Thinking of ML development tendencies in the future, we are probably all wondering “ So, what’s next?”.
3. Artificial Intellect (AI)
For some it sounds scary and draws cruel futuristic picture how machines overtake solution-making and dominate the world. At the same time others disagree and stand for AI as way to improve life quality and reduce risks in many fields.
Internet is full of insights and predictions, but let’s look through some fact-based statistics to get general impression about demand of AI based solutions in the nearest future. Giselle Abramovich perfectly reveals it in CMO.com’s article, based on numbers from recent surveys. Here are some of her statements put to chart:
It seems that business has AI on “to do” list on very primary positions. No surprise, since it looks like there’s a solution to any conceivable business or domestic problem.
Now you probably try to calculate what is the profit it brings? Well, to be honest numbers are huge. And they continue to grow since AI is applied in more fields annually. Let’s look together what is the forecast for revenues from the AI market worldwide suggested by Statista:
As we can see year 2019 seem to be the start point where it gets jet acceleration. It almost doubles by the year 2020 and keeps demonstrating progression with every second year. Although, chart isn’t illustrated with subcategories having highest potential, pretty obvious that next year we can expect growth of start-ups focusing on AI technologies. It’s promising business niche for investors even though highly competitive at the same time. So, for all those who are considering to start something related – it’s perfect time to jump on your wave.
In the second part of this article, we will discuss the remaining three categories, such as Robotics, Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) and Cloud Services.
