Artificial Intelligence everywhere
"Smart" really just used to mean connected – smartphones, smart TVs, and the plethora of other smart devices were really just the same old toys but connected to the internet. Today, “smart” increasingly means powered by artificial intelligence (AI) – generally machine learning algorithms – and capable of helping us in increasingly innovative ways.
Smart cars use facial recognition algorithms to detect whether we are paying attention to the road and alert us if we're getting tired. Smartphones use AI algorithms to do everything from maintain call quality to help us take better pictures, and of course, they are packed with apps that use AI to help us do just about anything. Even smart toilets are on their way – capable of helping to diagnose gastrointestinal issues by using computer vision to analyze stool samples!
AI has permeated the tools we use to carry out everyday work – from the ubiquitous voice assistants to language translation and tools that allow us to extract structured data from pictures, whiteboard scribblings, and hand-written notes. It also powers much of the robotic process automation that has enabled workloads to be lightened in admin, logistics, accounting, and HR departments. Whatever your industry or job function, you’re likely to find there’s an AI-powered solution designed to make your life easier.
This broad trend encompasses AI, the internet of things (IoT), and newly emerging super-fast networks like 5G, all of which are coming together to augment us with capabilities we didn’t have just a few years ago. This highlights the fact that on a longer timescale than the one we are specifically looking at here, the most impactful trend of all will be convergence. Growing data volumes, faster network and processor speeds, and the “democratization” of data (more on this below) are coming together and will affect society in a way that is much more than the sum of their parts.