Tag Archives: AI

Gartner’s Guesses—Predictions for IT in 2018

Posted on by

As another year begins to draw to a close, industry experts are already looking to the future. The IT industry has been dynamic over the past few years, with innovations such as improvements in cloud computing, machine learning, and even IT management propelling it forward. At the recent Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2017 in Orlando, FL, Gartner took a shot at the future of IT, painting a picture of the industry as being more integrated with business than ever. IT is now so central to operations that businesses can no longer afford to isolate their departments, and Gartner knows this.

Since IT is often a means of improving products/services and generating additional revenue, Gartner’s central point was that professionals in the industry will need to have a working grasp of business tactics and company goals. From there, they can set up IT departments that maximize technology usage to meet these goals. CIOs, Gartner believes, will become more integrated than ever into business operations and become important collaborators for the companies they work for.

One trend that Gartner discussed was cryptocurrency. Starting as a technological curiosity, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have since attracted significant interest for their value in facilitating swift and secure transactions. While working cryptocurrency into business models has proved to be slow going, Gartner predicts that over $1 billion in business value will be derived from it by 2020. They were also optimistic about the future of IoT-enabled devices, predicting an upsurge in these products with smartphone integration.

However, there were other trends that Gartner was less bullish about. The aforementioned prediction of IoT devices came with the caveat that that billions of dollars will be necessary for companies to safely harness this technology. IoT devices are almost famously difficult to completely secure given network decentralization, and their usage would divert funds that would otherwise be spent to improve cybersecurity.

The use of AI was also the subject of controversy for Gartner, with the company citing it as a potential contributor toward a future age of digital mistrust. While they praised the ability of AI to help inform business decisions, they also believe that its use on the web will hasten the spread of false information. This has social and financial implications, with Gartner stating that a major fraud as a result of these prolific falsehoods will occur by 2020. Commercial projects to detect and halt fake news have already begun, and a tenfold increase in these projects is predicted in the coming years.

Still, IT is slated to prosper. As its role in business changes and it becomes more integral to operations, the industry is expected to grow, with a predicted 2.3 million jobs being created as opposed to 1.8 eliminated. Early adoption is, as always, important in the IT sector, and one of the latest trends, visual and voice search, may be the next big investment. Both are growing quickly, and large tech companies are expected to invest in improving their visual and voice query offering through the use of AI.

There is a lot on the horizon for IT. While these improvements will undoubtedly be a boon for the companies and individuals that harness them, a level of caution is necessary. Much of this technology is relatively untested, posing security and operational concerns for businesses. Now more than ever, a need for skilled professionals is arising to ensure that companies are able to adopt in an efficient and safe manner.

How Artificial Intelligence Can Affect Cloud Computing

Posted on by

Cloud computing is massive frontier in its own right. Online activity has been redefined by the cloud, and it will come as no surprise that both the public and private sectors have eagerly adopted cloud data storage. But, like the fabled Wild West of yore, this technology is still being developed, with unknown changes over every horizon.

One of the ways that cloud computing is projected to grow is through artificial intelligence, another technology that has garnered recent attention. Many companies have posited that a fusion between AI and cloud technology has the capacity to usher in a new age of cloud computing. Recently, Aaron Levie, CEO of Box Inc., spoke about the company’s recent successes and mentioned that artificial intelligence would play a key role in their upcoming developments.

“We think that AI is going to be substantially powerful for the future of work, and we want to make sure we’re embedding intelligent experiences into everything we do and everything we build at Box,” said Levie.

Learning AI perhaps have the greatest potential to shake up the cloud sector. Machine learning has revolutionized the way that AI communicate with humans, respond to commands, and solve problems. This has manifested itself in a way that many already take for granted—voice-activated assistants such as Siri or Cortana. Cloud computer could potentially work in conjunction to help AI make better decisions and have access to more data. As an AI processes information from cloud servers, it can learn based on patterns that it finds and even send new data back into the cloud to help other machines learn as well.

Even beyond communication, other cognitive services such as image analysis can benefit from having a cloud’s worth of data to draw from. These improvements can advance security technologies with facial recognition software, and assist customers in a way that feels more in line with a human operator.

While cloud learning platforms, such as Google Cloud Machine Learning, provide the first steps towards the synergy of AI and cloud, but lack the deep learning frameworks that may be necessary for future developments. The next generation cloud computing model may be the AI First Cloud, as it is dubbed by CIO. Here, deep learning applications can be better implemented and run on a worldwide AI framework. Additionally, operational management tools could be revamped to allow for better control over the AI programs involved in infrastructure.

Ironically, future work with AI will require a lot of human input. While AI can process massive amounts of data through the cloud, it still makes mistakes, requiring data technicians to note errors and allow them to improve in the future. For example, IBM Watson, a popular AI cloud service intended to fight cybercrime, needs human input to learn about how to tackle different types of attacks. As cybersecurity is always evolving, it takes the efforts of numerous research to prepare Watson to do his job effectively.

The bottom line is that AI and cloud services are very synergistic—AI are able to process large amounts of cloud data, and the cloud becomes more useful when AI can complete tasks by request. An intelligent services revolution is on the horizon, and more experiments in cloud-based AI can help get there.