Top 8 Artificial Intelligence Trends To Watch For In 2018

The year 2017 saw both techno stalwarts and start-ups jumping into the AI ecosystem.

- Prakash Arunachalam

Suffice to say, Artificial Intelligence will begin to permeate every application and service at some level in the year 2018. According to Gartner, “The year 2018 will mark the beginning of a democratization of AI, extending its impact across a much broader swath of companies and governments than previously”. This indicates that AI will be included in the top five investment priorities that CIOs make during the year.

Let us take a glance at what it holds for the customer experience industry.

Go Cloud, Go Smart

AI technologies, especially machine learning and deep learning will emerge rapidly to add more power to the cloud. The amalgamation of cloud computing and machine learning will result in ‘the intelligent cloud’. Serving as a self-learning platform, it will be able to perform tasks more accurately and efficiently than ever before. This is likely to be the era of the next-generation cloud, one that provides scalability at a low cost, for storing and processing large volumes of data.

Talking about conversational interfaces

The past year, many vendors have been successful in applying conversational interfaces in smartphones and other devices.Virtual assistants such as Siri, Alexa, and Google Now are already making waves since they cater to the modern demands of the customer through text or voice. Virtual assistants are moving from being purely proactive to being highly personalized. In the coming year, it is expected that nearly 20 percent of the citizens belonging to developed countries will use AI-powered assistants to help them with various everyday operational tasks and about 40 percent of customer-facing employees and government workers will consult an AI virtual support agent for decision/process support. The reason being – better collaboration between humans and machines due to improved interfaces and new