Despite many challenges that we faced due to the pandemic in 2020, the momentum of growth for advanced technologies has continued. Especially, artificial intelligence (AI) is continuously finding increased usage in both the private and public sectors.
During 2020, there were developments around natural language processing (NLP) techniques (for example, GPT-3 model built to produce human-like texts), virtual assistants, job automation, and more. And it appears that AI growth is not going to slow down anytime soon.
AI predictions 2021
In 2021, AI will become the core business technology. Here are our top 10 reasons why.
Prediction #1: AI will enable contactless experiences.
One of the biggest AI predictions for 2021 is contactless service. Although with COVID-19 vaccine, 2021 will be a comparatively safer year, but some lessons learnt like social distancing, contactless shopping, remote working etc. are here to stay. Thus, we will see new AI-powered technologies that will facilitate contactless experiences.
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For example, in retail sector, we will see more retailers giving self-shopping experience to their customers by allowing them to take virtual trials, scan their products’ price tags, expiry dates, and pay directly through their devices. Hotels, on the other hand, might use Identity Document Scanners to capture details of their guests without physical contact or document exchange.
Similarly, healthcare will increasingly provide consultation through video visit platforms, and adopt technologies like telehealth and teletherapy. Finance will be offering branchless banking and parametric insurance in 2021.
Authentication technology like facial recognition will be implemented by enterprises for strong authentication.
Prediction #2: There will be more robotic process automation (RPA).
The robotic process automation, which enables the automation of repetitive tasks, is going to see rapid growth in 2021. Our AI predictions say that it will grow more than it did last year. According to Gartner (September 2020), the global revenue of RPA software will continue to grow, reaching nearly $2 billion in 2021, which is 20 percent more than the previous year.
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We will see more of RPA as a service model as more and more organizations will embrace it in some form (like SaaS or ITaaS) in the post COVID-19 era. When combined with AI, RPA can help CIOs self-detect, spot, and respond quickly to IT anomalies in real-time, reducing any dependency on human workforce and insuring the organizations against any future impacts like coronavirus pandemic.
For example, in healthcare, RPA can automate some burdensome tasks such as inventory management, appointment scheduling, billing, and processing. For employees, RPA adoption by organizations will improve their experiences by liberating the employees from mundane tasks to allow them stay productive.
Overall, we foresee that RPA in 2021 and beyond will become one of the foundational technologies for the organizations.
Prediction #3: Growth of digital twin simulation technology.
Another area that we expect to emerge as the winner is the simulation and the concept of digital twin technology.
Digital twin technology is the concept of creating digital representation, simulation, or mockups of a physical product or asset to understand how the real object will be affected by inputs.
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In 2021, we will see more and more companies creating simulations of their products, services or processes or even the whole supply chain process, in order to auto-generate data for the same for better analysis, before implementing them in the real world.
In the healthcare sector, digital twin technology will find increased adoption, especially for the doctors to diagnose diseases as early as possible and optimize treatments.
Prediction #4: Reinforcement learning will open the way for new types of algorithms.
In 2021, we expect to see more reinforcement learning in the development of more real-world applications. The agile AI or robots would be provided training through reinforcement learning to flexibly navigate, handle and manipulate the objects to provide solutions to problems in real-world scenarios.
Prediction #5: GPT-4 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) will make its way.
The GPT, created by the startup OpenAI, is a super adaptable deep learning language model that can be applied to a wide range of applications. It can do natural language processing tasks, generate text from summaries, and much more.
In 2019, GPT-2 was released – it was the first NLP model with more than 1 billion parameters. During that time, it was seen as a big thing. In 2020, GPT-3 was published, which had 175 billion parameters.
This buzz will continue in 2021 as well with the launch of a high-quality, multi-model named GPT-4, which will have as much as 1 trillion parameters.
GPT-4 will reach par excellence in its capabilities. Hopefully, this will be revealed sometime in mid-2021.
Prediction #6: Predictive and prescriptive analytic tools will see more advancements.
Predictive analytics is looking into the historical data, understanding what it tells by using past trends, events, and information, and then taking steps to make predictions using the AI models. Next, comes prescriptive analytics where you make recommendations or get automated decisions based on the predictions made by the predictive AI models.
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The growing focus on remote monitoring to support the COVID-19 pandemic, and the need to anticipate future scenarios to plan business continuity is driving the adoption of predictive and prescriptive analytics tools.
We are expecting that this process of analysis and data interpretation will see more advancements in 2021 to help companies get better data insights, especially in the healthcare and life sciences, banking, government, and IT sectors.
Prediction #7: Automated deployments: AI will shape Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD).
As the state of remote working continues around the world, businesses will look for more innovative ways for business continuity throughout the pandemic and beyond. In 2021, more and more workloads will shift to the cloud and this will increase the need to manage Big Data. Along with regular data generation tools, Data Lakes and Data Warehouses will provide utility for data-intensive applications, which process large data volumes.
We would see more advanced versions of CI/CD platforms and more capabilities in pipeline tools that will help leverage the big data and analytics to get deeper insights into software delivery.
Also Read: Big Data Processing Services Comparison: Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Google Cloud, IBM, Microsoft
Prediction #8: Generative AI will create new generation media-prep tools.
The recent advancements in generative AI will develop tools and algorithms to generate misinformation using fake content, like auto-generated posts on social media and deep fake videos, that are virtually unidentical from the real thing.
Source: Pexels
But looking at the positive aspect, enterprises will use generative AI to create artificial 2D and 3D images to represent their product or brand in a better way in the market. This will help them deliver quality customer services by providing a variety of visuals based on their interest.
Prediction #9: More regulations on privacy and security will surge federated learning.
The ‘new normal’ will force organizations to accelerate regulations on privacy and security in 2021. This will have a huge impact on the way AI/ML models are being designed. Because of this, companies will invest in data management to get a holistic solution. Companies that combine federated learning to develop better data management platforms and solutions will succeed in building great AI tools.
To elaborate, the idea behind federated learning is about enabling edge devices to do state of the art machine learning so that there is not one central database that could be potentially breached.
So, 2021 should bring more of that.
Prediction #10: There will be more transparency into the inner workings of AI models.
AI transparency is having access to see how AI models are working or what they are being used for or who is making decisions around them.
In 2021, enterprises will establish AI governance in their organizations by implementing strong AI models that they can trust, within their machine learning operations. This will enable them to track what functions AI apps carry and if there are any privacy violations. We are expecting that there will more robust cybersecurity solutions with the ability to identify potential flaws in the system.
Wrapping up
With this, we come to the end of top 10 biggest AI predictions that we think will take place in this world in 2021. We hope that 2021 will enable you to bring more innovations that you can implement and benefit from.
Any thoughts? Let us know in the comments section.
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