AI is going to take over the world, just not the way you think

New estimates from Gartner put the total business value derived from artificial intelligence at $1.2 trillion in 2018, a year-on-year increase of 70%, before booming to $3.9 trillion in 2022.

The rise of AI in the business world has been well documented, though the real-world impact might not have been noticed by everyone. Technology companies are experts at incrementally feeding us progress to ease the transition to normality, therefore these figures might come as a shock to some. AI sounds incredibly futuristic, but according to Gartner, it is here.

“AI promises to be the most disruptive class of technologies during the next 10 years due to advances in computational power, volume, velocity and variety of data, as well as advances in deep neural networks (DNNs),” said John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner.

“One of the biggest aggregate sources for AI-enhanced products and services acquired by enterprises between 2017 and 2022 will be niche solutions that address one need very well. Business executives will drive investment in these products, sourced from thousands of narrowly focused, specialist suppliers with specific AI-enhanced applications.”

Forecast of Global AI-Derived Business Value (Billions of US Dollars)

We’ve already seen the first signs of AI when it comes to the digital economy and targeted advertising. Although this might be simple in comparison to the usecases of tomorrow, it has already driven incredible value for the technology community. Just ask the likes of Facebook, Google and Amazon, all of whom have profited off advanced data science, predictive analytics and machine learning. It is by no means perfect, but the first steps never are.

Looking specifically at the telco space, machine learning and rule-based automation technologies are starting to appear in the way networks are managed, while AI is becoming a hot-topic when it comes to customer service and experience. Vodafone is one company which has been leading the way through the introduction of AI into customer interactions, TOBi, though this is a trend which will become much more common over the coming years and months. This will only be the start however.

Looking at the areas where AI will contribute in the future, Gartner predicts decision support/augmentation (such as DNNs) will represent 36% of the global AI-derived business value in 2018, a figure which will increase to 44% by 2022. Virtual agents, such as in customer services, account for 46% of the global AI-derived business value in 2018 and 26% by 2022, by which time other usecases will begin to mature.

Automated tasks and optimising business processes is one which might worry those in the workplace, but for those organizations which are feeling the pinch of lower profitability, these trends cannot emerge soon enough. This is an area which is potentially very contentious and damaging to society on the whole, as this is when we start talking about redundancies. Translating voice to text and vice versa, processing handwritten forms or images, and classifying other rich data content not readily accessible to conventional systems, could make numerous low-skilled worker redundant. Gartner predicts this area of AI could grow to 16% of all business value derived from AI in 2022, up from 2% today.

Don’t expect a violent rebellion of AI driven machines, they will just make us all unemployed. It’s more of a white-collar, middle-class uprising.