120 AI Predictions For 2020

“Board rooms and C-suites of the world’s largest B2C brands have turned their focus onto personalization and AI-driven customer experiences, yet they are struggling to bring their vision into reality. This is due to departmental structures (and politics), aging technology infrastructures, and a lack of senior and mid-level managers who can articulate business needs and translate them into technological solutions. Because such a transformation is critical to their survival, we’ll see increased emphasis and risk-taking on creating the customer experience of the future”—Liad Agmon, CEO, Dynamic Yield

“Throughout 2020, expect to see the energy around artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) shift from research into engineering, bringing an increased focus on managing the AI/ML lifecycle in production. Expect to also see increased investment in data preparation—an integral component in any data project that is still often regarded as the biggest bottleneck for many—driving improvement in data quality and relieve IT from the pressures of preparing data. Lastly, there will be an increased focus on monitoring AI/ML pipelines, which helps track the quality of prediction serving in production, as well as compares production workload traces to repeat the cycle of data prep and quality in the face of new evidence”—Joe Hellerstein, Co-Founder and CSO, Trifacta

“As voice becomes more useful for consumers to quickly and easily do things with just a simple voice command, we’ll see the volume of voice queries explode. Each of these queries represents a consumer intent, generally highly correlated with an action consumers want to take—add to my shopping cart, navigate to the nearest Starbucks, etc.—high value, transaction-oriented consumer intents. Any consumer-focused AI platform will need to be able to collect and analyze this massive volume of high value consumer touch points represented by voice commands”—John Foster, CEO, Aiqudo

“In recent years, we have seen more and more countries developing national artificial intelligence strategies. The enormous economic value that lies in AI will likely enable an increase in efficiency and well-being in all aspects of life. However, from the perspective of a government agency, the move towards implementing this technology must be accompanied with appropriate infrastructure, availability of databases and regulation, especially in matters of autonomous decision-making and privacy. There must also be thorough preparation of human capital to cope with the labor market challenges brought about by an era of intelligent machines”—Aharon Aharon, CEO, Israel Innovation Authority

“The truth is that voice is far from where it needs to be before it’s a reliable AI-based engagement tool, and 2020 will not be the year we reach that destination. Even some of the most advanced AI-based voice solutions are only right for certain applications, struggle outside of controlled environments and must overcome a higher level, or perhaps deeper depth, uncanny valley factor that comes with speech-based human-machine interaction. Voice will get better, we will find the right applications to deploy it and we will get used to using it, but for 2020, it’s not ready and narrow so don’t put all your eggs in that basket just yet”—Ryan Lester, Senior Director, Customer Engagement Technologies, LogMeIn

“Retailers will increasingly turn to AI as their main source of marketing insights as opposed to surveys and studies. Many retailers, however, will still struggle to turn those insights derived from AI into actionable business rules for their pricing, supply chain and merchandising. AI is becoming more and more mainstream, but not all companies yet realize that using AI technology for data analysis is only the first step into a larger process of true transformation”—Georges Bory, Managing Director, ActiveViam

“In 2020, from a few corners of the world, we will start to see AI built to tackle hard, meaningful problems; AI built to help us humans do what we cannot, as opposed to simply attempting to mimic our abilities. ‘Amplified Intelligence’ is what we call this next-era AI”—Dr. Radhika Dirks, CEO, XLabs

“With AI actually baked into the chips themselves, a whole new era of computing at the source is being empowered—and we are only at the beginning. AI chips are already improving vehicles’ abilities to process visual data more efficiently, paving the way for autonomous vehicles of the future. For smart cities, AI chips will assist with crucial tasks such as real-time traffic monitoring, locating missing persons, and finding stolen vehicles. For smart homes, chips will ensure more privacy and reliability by processing data at the source. Demand for these new technologies will set the stage for a variety of new applications and use cases, fueling the activity of next generation products and refinement of product needs. A new age of AI chips means a new age of technology”—Orr Danon, Co-Founder and CEO, Hailo

“We’re going to start seeing some dramatic breakthroughs and some real transformative changes in 2020. To an extent not seen to date, AI and ML will, so to speak, emerge from the lab and infiltrate your life. A recession, if there is one in 2020, will accelerate this coming AI/ML impact. That’s because a lot of the efforts that AI and ML are focused on automation and building efficiencies in the way humans work”—Peter Guagenti, CMO, MemSQL

“Yesterday’s Hadoop platform teams are today’s AI/analytics teams. What used to be statistical models now has converged with computer science and has become AI and machine learning. So data, analytics, and AI teams can’t be siloed from one another any longer. In fact, they need to collaborate and work together to derive value from the same data that they all use. In 2020, we’ll see more organizations building dedicated teams around the data stack”—Haoyuan Li, Founder and CTO, Alluxio

“Machine learning and artificial intelligence will deliver cost savings through greater cloud efficiencies. Achieving this will require the environment or application to understand when it needs more resources and then automatically scaling up those resources to meet the increased demand. Conversely, the technology will need to understand when specific resources are no longer needed and safely turn them off to minimize costs”—Frank Jablonski, VP, Global Marketing, SIOS Technology

“New advances in enterprise graphs and machine learning will enable context identification and content recommendation, helping information workers cope with information sprawl. AI will help transform the digital workplace by augmenting and focusing human efforts and reducing cognitive burden by delivering information based on users’ current context”—Yaacov Cohen, Co-Founder and CEO, harmon.ie

“In 2020, AI will dramatically improve the employee experience (EX). The ability to automatically and instantly collect data from across multiple channels, analyze it and provide actionable insight will enable support agents to more quickly, easily and accurately address customer inquiries and come to highly satisfactory issue resolution”—Anand Janefalkar, Founder and CEO, UJET

“Because the supply chain industry has historically been slow to adopt when it comes to digitization, there simply hasn’t been enough collected data for AI/ML algorithms to make reliable suggestions. As we start to see a more modern supply chain emerge in 2020, AI and ML algorithms will enable a 30,000-foot view of the supply chain and provide valuable insights to ease previously tedious processes like product redirects, new partner and supplier onboarding, order cancellations, oversupply and more”—Jorge Rodriguez, SVP of Product Development, Cleo

“Enterprises will finally transition into deploying complex AI models in production at scale. So far, most AI applications were either experiments (i.e. not in production), or simple recommendation/prediction/regression models, or they were applied on smaller problems. In 2020, we will see more enterprises getting bolder with their AI ambitions and requiring their vendors to support large deployments”—Sudhir Jha, Senior Vice President and Head of Brighterion, Mastercard

“As data volumes continue to explode, one of the key challenges is how to get the full strategic value of this data. Object storage will be instrumental in helping to process AI and ML workloads in 2020 as this newer storage architecture leverages metadata in ways traditional file storage doesn’t”—Jon Toor, CMO, Cloudian

“In 2020, AI will help to close gaps in merchant capabilities that many small businesses with limited resources face. With AI, small businesses can manage their stores seamlessly and efficiently, both by automating work processes (such as employee management, IT service administration, or compliance regulation management) and enabling better inventory and delivery management. AI-based chatbots and virtual assistants further streamline business transactions and increase operational efficiencies, while also providing an optimal customer experience”—Phil Grier, Commerce Engineer, Yahoo Small Business

“In 2020, AI will become much more accessible to non-technical SEOs. From AI automating meta descriptions, to automating titles or redirects, the technology will permeate day-to-day tasks that are normally time-consuming but necessary. But specialists shouldn’t fear what’s new—instead they should keep a pulse on the industry innovation and align more closely with the data science field whenever possible”—Britney Muller, Senior SEO Scientist, Moz 

“We will start seeing domain specific digital companions that will help us accomplish tasks and make better use of technology—for example, a proactive co-driver that will help us work the technology in the car, become safer drivers and anticipate our needs during the drive”—Dafna Presler, VP Marketing, Intuition Robotics 

“5G, IoT integration and the associated ability to connect distributed and diverse data sources into a ‘systems of intelligence’ will drive huge AI opportunities in consumer and content management, network optimization and integration of an exploding number of sensor-based data sources. Consumer data regulations, legacy technology and the degree of interaction with a technology fluent consumer will gauge adoption. Telco and Entertainment and Energy have fairly low hurdles in these areas and have additional trends that are helping AI adoption”—Simon Moss, Global Partner, Automation and AI, Infosys Consulting

“By 2025, ‘real time’ won’t be good enough. The industry will need AI in order to move beyond real time to become predictive. We will need to go one step further to actually predict what’s coming before it happens—like a meteorologist predicting the weather. Large sets of accurate data can provide context and highlight emerging patterns, revealing degrees of probability. With a little help from AI, prediction is within reach”—Tim Armandpour, SVP of Engineering, PagerDuty

“In 2020, we will witness even more of a shift from people-centric to data-centric, automated decision making that leverages predictive and prescriptive analytics, including AI. This will require industries to make better use of technology and analytics in their supply chains in order to respond to customer demands for tailored products and services. With this will come a greater emphasis on the need to reskill the workforce and revamp data infrastructures. We’re already seeing an increased demand for professional development courses and certifications outpacing nonprofessional 4-year degree programs within supply chain as a way to stay relevant”—Abe Eshkenazi, CEO, Association for Supply Chain Management (ASCM)

“Edge processing with AI creates a better IoT experience. IoT device makers know the benefits of edge-based processing, but until now, many of the challenges in terms of cost, performance and security have made it impractical for implementing in consumer products and systems. The shift toward more use of edge processing in conjunction with cloud connectivity has begun in earnest and will continue to evolve in 2020. From a consumer perspective, this trend will result in an IoT experience that’s faster, more reliable and more private”—Patrick Worfolk, CTO, Synaptics

“In 2020, enterprises looking to gain full visibility into their hybrid IT environments will require AIOps-based solutions that integrate infrastructure monitoring, workload automation and capacity planning into one platform. As such, vendors who fail to adopt an AIOps model of service and enterprises who fail to invest in end-to-end infrastructure visibility will be unable to deliver on customer requirements and performance SLAs”—Philippe Vincent, CEO, Virtana

“In 2020, we will start to see traditional Enterprise Content Management (ECM) platforms begin to focus on collaboration services to enable content accessibility to both internal and external business partners. While traditionally ECM providers have focused on providing a repository of data and automation for a designated audience (business executives, customers, etc.), in the coming year we will see a major shift towards investment in AI and machine learning to improve workflow visualization”—Thomas Phelps, VP, Corporate Strategy and CIO, Laserfiche

“Amid the past year’s severe weather conditions and with climate change looming, farmers and agronomists are confronted with a number of formidable challenges. As the agriculture industry embraces digital management solutions, AI will streamline the entire process, from gathering imagery to delivering actionable insights, improving accuracy and reducing human error. Integrating AI into farming will strengthen farmers’ expertise and knowledge by providing them with valuable insights and deeper understanding of their fields. Agriculture’s digital revolution will make it easier for farmers and their agronomic partners to develop further solutions to combat the effects of climate change”—Ofir Schlam, Co-Founder and CEO, Taranis

“AI’s role in the payments space is more than just a means for stronger data science and payment fraud prevention technologies. As financial regulations evolve to meet the new demands of the global payments landscape, we will see AI play an integral role in ensuring merchant compliance and seamless customer experience. In the years to come, AI will enable businesses to streamline operations, better serve customers and in turn, create exponential developments economically and culturally”—Igal Rotem, CEO, Credorax

“In the coming years, companies should focus less on how tech can replace traditional jobs and more on how AI and human expertise can complement one another. We strongly believe in the combination of AI and human expertise—we call it the science and the art. Tech will always be able to do things faster than humans. But there are also areas where tech will never replace humans. Negotiations, for example, require intuition, confidence, and deal making experience that computers cannot replicate. Our belief is that we will need to continue to work towards finding that perfect balance between science and art in 2020”—Guy Zipori, Co-Founder and CEO, Skyline AI

“It’s easier now than ever to do in-database indexing and analytics, and we have tools to make sure data can be moved to the right place. The mysticism of data is gone: consolidation and the rapid demise of Hadoop distributors in 2019 is a signal of this shift. The next focus area will be very distributed, or ‘wide data.’ Data formats are becoming more varied and fragmented, and as a result different types of databases suitable for different flavors of data have more than doubled”—Dan Sommer, Senior Director, Global Market Intelligence Lead, Qlik

“Many AI solutions today attempt to convert user data into advertising money. Amidst AI’s meteoric rise, I expect in 2020 to see more users raise the following question: how can these same AI solutions work for me on a daily basis, as opposed to work on me. This question alone will push AI into places we perceive today as sacrosanct, whether that be parenting, relationships, education, etc. On a positive note, this means that AI tools will allow for greater individualization and a personal touch. Companies creating these AI applications, however, must prioritize protecting the personal data they collect”—Tal Guttman, Co-Founder and CEO, Jiminy

“We’ll see the rise of Digital Ethics Officers, who will be responsible for implementing ethical frameworks to make decisions. This includes security, bias, intended use, and built-in governance”—Sanjay Srivastava, Chief Digital Officer, Genpact

“As opposed to being a cause of job insecurity in 2020, artificial intelligence will prove to be a crucial tool for improving careers. Through AI, employers will be able to provide enhanced opportunities for their employees and facilitate the diversity of experience they crave. Thanks to AI, employees will be able to expand and enhance their skill sets and ensure they stay relevant in a rapidly evolving market. Accountability, particularly with respect to explaining results and bias prevention, will continue to go hand-in-hand with AI’s development”—Amichai Schreiber, Co-Founder and CTO, InnerMobility by Gloat

“There is a fundamental shift occurring in the insurance industry: carriers know they need to significantly improve customer experience and ensure that their products are relevant and personalized. AI will be used by many in 2020 to achieve these goals and AI will be crucial for modernizing the underwriting experience. AI enables insurers to better utilize the troves of data at their disposal to benefit from vital client insights that maximize their services and products. This results in satisfied customers and a more efficient business”—Yaffa Cohen-Ifrah, CMO and Head of Corporate Communications, Sapiens

“Machine learning and neural networks are the muscle behind AI innovations that are taking the world by storm. Over the last 3 years, we have seen a definitive shift on the Udemy platform to AI and data science courses, as businesses try to address their knowledge gaps. With the increasing demand for data scientists and AI experts, we anticipate the continued growth of what we call Capability Academies. Capability Academies are in-depth training initiatives to develop and sustain skill capabilities that support specific business strategies and function areas”—Shelley Osborne, VP of Learning, Udemy

“In 2020, real world implementations of AI and machine learning will grow, especially in the banking and finance industry. Organizations that implement AI solutions will be able to accelerate and improve finance and treasury processes. Specifically, we will see the deployment of intelligent chatbots that will answer customer and vendor inquiries as well as intelligent software agents for invoice capture, cash application, exception or dispute handling, calculating customer credit risk and detecting fraud”—Vishal Awasthi, SVP of Technology and Products, Serrala

“Empathy in the machine dialogue will become very important. Voice assistant adoption will be massively improved if you get a level of empathy in that machine dialogue. Alexa and other players will likely become more emotional and detect things like frustration in user responses. It’s going to be a significant improvement in 2020 and beyond”—Holger Reisinger, SVP Large Enterprise, Jabra

“2020 will see more focus on explainable AI, to reduce any bias in the predictions. Data scientists will become an integral part of the product teams and work closely with them to create a data-first approach to app development, instead of focusing on making sense of data generated by apps”—Sanjay Jupudi, President, Qentelli

“Natural Language Processing (NLP) combined with AI will increasingly make decisions that may be inscrutable to human observers, whether by analyzing stock data to make investment decisions, or parsing mountains of unstructured social media for broad sentiment analysis around a brand, or specific intelligence on who to target for which product pitch. But, training is everything. A lot of these algorithms are being trained on existing human practices that are inherently biased and problematic. It’d be naive to assume we can eliminate that from NLP algorithms at the outset”—Eric Sammer, Distinguished Engineer, Splunk

“In 2020, healthcare organizations will leverage AI to assist medical staff in providing patients with possible prognoses for their symptoms. Developing AI tools that can be translated from one health system to another will have some complexity, but once the healthcare industry puts an effort behind allowing AI to become more scalable, solutions will be better positioned to move beyond a departmental or hospital specialty”—Jim VanderMey, CIO, OST

” As more companies set out to solve problems that are about the relationships between things, locations, and people, graph technology will become more popular in enterprises. The problem for graph in 2020 is the lack of understanding around the technology, and as a result the shortage of talent with specific graph skills. Thinking through problems with a ‘relationship-first’ mindset will help graph adoption to be successful”—Patrick McFadin, VP of developer relations, DataStax

“Voice usage will continue to explode, but not in the way you think. Assistants like Alexa and Siri have somewhat topped out as a standalone experience around things like music, podcasts and weather. The breakthrough will be that the primary way we use voice will be in our apps, telling our apps what to do e.g. order dinner, buy movie tickets or research a product. Every app will have to be re-engineered to be voice-first, just like we all became mobile-first a decade ago”—Tobias Dengel, CEO, WillowTree

“Using the power of AI at the edge and self-learning models, in 2020, machine learning models can move beyond traditional analytics capabilities and significantly improve predictive functionality and overall ROI. With edge AI, software can proactively interface with live data streams and cater to intelligence at or near the source, leading to increased overall productivity, efficiency, and cost-savings”—Senthil Kumar, VP of Software Engineering, FogHorn

“The internet of things (IoT), through services such as Echo and Siri, has been democratized and popularized for consumers in the home. In 2020, IoT will be democratized in the workplace with the advent of affordable, plug-and-play technology that improves the user experience and productivity in meetings. AI will be crucial to this process”—Oded Gal, CPO, Zoom Video Communications

“GDPR and CCPA are good starts in regulating data, but soon the best AI and data solutions companies will go beyond those guidelines and promise that any users’ data they gather will be employed to directly benefit those users. The organizations able to make that promise will provide AI and data solutions that gather data about users’ behavior and context, correlate users’ action with best outcomes, then teach users best-practices—and they’ll refine those practices with each and every user”—Jake Saper, Partner, Emergence Capital

“In 2020, AI will play a much bigger role in driving two-way dialogue with data. AI does the heavy lifting, diving deep into data and uncovering insights (ones that teams didn’t even know to look for in the first place). Over time, AI can learn what benefits the end user and cater the search accordingly. It continues a harmony that can exist between man and machine, bringing together the strengths of human creativity and context, with the power and scale of machines. AI can fill a resource gap, as an ‘always on’ assistant, freeing up teams for more creative and high-value tasks”—John Bates, Director of Product Management, Adobe Analytics

“With the rise of automation to carry out day to day business functions, leveraging AI to augment human capabilities will continue to be a delicate balance. Whether being used to automate repetitive tasks (data prep, etc.) or connecting pipelines through contextual information from you and your peers, AI will begin to infiltrate all areas of business functions”—Laurent Bride, CTO and COO, Talend

“In 2020, the Turing Test is passed emphatically, and the potent combination of video deepfakes and conversational chatbots give human-like AIs massive swagger. These AIs benevolently make their way into customer service, shopping, and healthcare. They take a darker turn toward social media, blackhat security, and political campaigns. In the end, we don’t know the difference between humans acting fake and fake humans”—Nick Caldwell, Chief Product Officer, Looker

“In 2020, companies will realize that they are limiting their understanding of customer behaviors by only considering rational decision making enabled by AI-driven fact-based technology. The missing piece is that as humans, the core of our decision making is emotional. Looking forward, companies must learn to balance the use of Artificial Intelligence with Artificial Humanity, which accounts for the emotional—and sometimes irrational—drivers behind human decision making. Companies will look to uncover the valid and valuable use of AI in fact-based rationale, and the need to balance this with creating emotional bonds through human interactions”—Matt Matsui, Chief Product Officer, Calabrio

“AI is fueling a paradigm shift in software and, more broadly, in how businesses across industries deliver digital experiences. Heading into 2020 and beyond, companies will become more forward-thinking by designing customer experiences with an ‘AI-first’ mindset—moving beyond automating tools for specific tasks, or adding ‘smart’ features to traditional software, but rather leveraging AI as a problem-solving partner”—Scott Prevost, Vice President of Engineering, Adobe Sensei

“We expect to see the use of AI accelerate in 2020, as companies increasingly use the data they collect to build and deploy AI models powering new services and generating new business insights. If they hope to keep these companies happy, data centers need to respond, not just with faster networks and servers in their core data centers, but also edge data centers that enable the deployment of AI models closer to end-users. In 2020, we expect data center owners and operators to increasingly focus on how they can deliver the performance their customers need for AI-enabled cloud services”—John Schmidt, VP, Cloud Hyperscale Solutions, CommScope

“In 2020, the focus on analytics will be driven by increased regulatory and compliance pressures, risks from data breaches and ransomware, and the need to properly classify data for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning projects. Without ‘clean’ data of value, those AI and ML projects will stumble. I expect more businesses to be hitting this point in their ‘data maturity’ where analytics projects take priority”—Matt Tyrer, Technology Evangelist, Commvault

“The greatest potential for AI is not ‘artificial’ but ‘augmented’ intelligence. How we can design and make accessible machine intelligence so that it can help us get to optimal decisions and actions? When we give artificial intelligence a seat at the table with the other diverse humans, we increase the performance of the team. We’re only beginning to explore the potential of augmented intelligence”—Loni Stark, Senior Director, Content & Commerce, Adobe

“2020 will be about finally creating an in-meeting experience that’s as adaptive as the pre-call experience. For users, that means making sure the right people get the right focus, users always have the right information in front of them at the right time, and everyone is in a position to make more dynamic decisions faster. From an infrastructure perspective, that means gathering information across a multitude of systems and applying it to future needs by leveraging AI to adjust based on predictive behavior”—Jordan Owens, VP of architecture, Pexip

“What the world is calling AI today will split into several areas in 2020, which someone in marketing will inevitably create pithier names for. These include: Robotic Process Automation (RPA); automated feature engineering and selection; perception AI, which is the automation and refinement of physical perception; and resource allocation AI, the marriage of optimization technologies to sense and respond to demands in real-time”—Cheryl Wiebe, Practice Lead, Industrial Intelligence Consulting, Teradata

“With respect to Artificial Intelligence, just because data exists within an organization doesn’t mean that data is in a usable, transferable format. 2020 is the year that businesses will begin to understand that their data is not AI-ready, rendering their business processes inefficient, ineffective or inaccurate”—Carl Vause, CEO, Soft Robotics

“A massive expansion for the Internet of Things and the growing trend of software instrumentation will put an increased focus on time series data in 2020. Smart cars and internet-connected machines are starting to produce huge volumes of time-stamped data that companies need to collect and analyze, while new software monitoring and measuring strategies have created enormous logs of events that need similar treatment. These trends account for the largest portion of data growth today—and the data from these sources always has a core element of time that is crucial to any meaningful analysis. Many enterprises will realize they need a specific strategy for time series data to glean the full value of its business potential”—Evan Kaplan, CEO, InfluxData

“AI is both under- and over-hyped in that it can be transformative for a business, but leaders aren’t sure how to get the best use out of it. CIOs should evaluate what processes can be automated to free up time for workers to deliver deeper insights to the business. Technologies like AI will also expand software features that have yet to be discovered. Those that enable SaaS companies to provide lower costs of delivery will control the market as the space matures and competition grows”—Karl Mosgofian, CIO, Gainsight

“As AI evolves, it will soon become the expected entry point for contact center technology standards. Additionally, AI will be accessible and leveraged by both smaller contact centers and large contact centers. AI will also begin to integrate with omnichannel solutions to instantly solve consumer questions/demands. However, the biggest shift in the use of AI is expected to come from the collections industry as it looks to both catch up and automatically comply with ever-changing FCC regulations”—Jesse Bird, Co-Founder and CTO, TCN

“With AI and data becoming centralized, manufacturers are forced to pay massive fees to top cloud providers to access data that is keeping systems up and running. As a result, new routes to training AI that can be deployed and refined at the edge will become more prevalent. As we move into the new year, more and more manufacturers will begin to turn to the edge to generate data, minimize latency problems and reduce massive cloud fees. By running AI where it is needed (at the edge), manufacturers can maintain ownership of their data”—Max Versace, PhD, Co-Founder CEO, Neurala

“In 2020, we’ll start to hit the limits of computing power for Deep Learning. As Moore’s Law slows, companies will run out of computing resources for complex AI tasks. Instead of just throwing more GPUs at a problem, we’ll have to think about optimization, and using the resources we have in the most efficient way”—Omri Geller, Co-Founder and CEO, Run.AI

“In 2020, we will see the integration of conversational AI emerge as a top priority for those in the c-suite. This tracks to the demand Accenture has seen from clients in the C-suite who are interested in incorporating conversational AI technologies into their business models. The same research also cites C-suite-led commitment as essential to scaling AI”—Laetitia Cailleteau, Conversational AI Global Lead at Accenture and a Founder of Accenture’s London Liquid Studios

“As 5G leads to greater IoT adoption and creates new opportunities for disruption, in-memory-accelerated real-time machine learning will be needed to address these challenges. AI/ML will get closer to edge and IoT devices and will emerge as the best approach to creating a great application experience”—John DesJardins, VP of Solution Architecture and CTO, Hazelcast

“AI techniques with which we are familiar today—such as neural networks, event clustering, and regression—will be joined by less familiar techniques such as topological data analysis (TDA) and generative neural nets. TDA holds promise in commercial applications because data has shape and shape matters. TDA maps the geometric structure of datasets that are large, highly dimensional or noisy to detect patterns and uncover insights”—Phil Tee, CEO, Moogsoft

“2020 will see a consumer outage of a banking site or retail site driven by an AI algorithm making the wrong decision. The AI algorithm will observe unusual behavior and wrongly determine, for example, that a breach is happening. It will then take the system offline, resulting in loss of revenue and service to customers. This incident will result in a shift back to ‘decision support’ as people become more skeptical and risk-averse”—Antony Edwards, CTO, Eggplant Software

“While 2020 won’t be the year that we hand over self-driving keys to our cars, we should see some incremental yet meaningful improvements in AI, along with an ever-increasing number of applications. It will be exciting to see AI continue to work its way into all kinds of technology products in seemingly simple ways that make processes more efficient”—Lane Lillquist, Co-Founder and CTO, InCloudCounsel

“In 2020, companies will focus less on shipping traditional applications and focus more on selling AI use cases. They’ll offer customers AI models for a specific use case (i.e. diagnosing repair needs in 5G infrastructure) and separate models for a different use case (i.e. determining when oil and gas infrastructure needs to be retired). Organizations will rely less on one-size-fits-all apps and instead leverage highly specialized models for custom use cases, which will ultimately deliver better results”—Arka Dhar, CEO, Zinier

“The use of conversational AI will provide a new channel for engaging both the workforce and customers. Moving beyond simple chatbots, the powerful combination of context awareness, natural language processing, ability to have smart interactions, and more robust intent libraries will enable virtual agents to take action. Virtual agents will not only be able to converse in dialogue but also will be able to seamlessly transition into the delivery of a multi-media experience to guide users to information, answers, or troubleshoot a problem”—John Prestridge, SVP of North America, EasyVista

“We’re still very early in the adoption of AI in retail. To date, most of the adoption has been in the supply chain, such as automating inventory data management, and customer service (chatbots to answer questions). I believe we’ll see more retailers deploying AI-enabled technologies, such as cameras that measure store traffic and make adjustments to digital screen content, as well as deployment of voice-enabled assistants that customers can use while shopping in-store”—Trey Courtney, Global Chief Product & Partnerships Officer, Mood Media

“AI will play an integral role in the continual evolution of building the ideal ad stack. AI will allow publishers to dynamically adjust demand sources—an act that has historically been performed by humans—and ultimately create a way to maximize revenue in real time”—Kurt Donnell, President, Freestar

“While more companies will take an ‘AI First’ approach to their digital transformation projects, many will still struggle to operationalize AI, with the biggest challenges stemming from lack of trust and transparency in automated decisioning systems. Unless ethical issues are addressed, AI adoption will slow down, threatening its value in many enterprises. Balancing the risk of AI versus the value of AI will become a top-of-mind discussion for most Fortune 500 CEOs and boards”—Matt Sanchez, CTO, CognitiveScale

“Thanks to AI, the speed at which marketers will be able to gather, analyze and execute targeted campaigns will continue to get faster, resulting in more effective marketing strategies. Marketers will be able to create the right piece of content for the right person and place the piece in the right channel in real time, as opposed to six months from now”—Michelle Yancey, Group Account Director, Centerline Digital

“AI engines will continue to be an essential component of advertising technology. In 2020, companies that over-rely on manual optimizations will be left further behind as no human can compete with the power of an AI engine. Additionally, there is a growing trend of expanding AI tools from the core business into the operational aspects across teams. As the tools leveraged continue to be commoditized, it will enable more and more teams to utilize them, whether they are AI experts or not”—Tal Mor, CTO, Tremor Video

“AI’s expanded application, from machine-learning and reasoning (e.g., semantic targeting, ‘you may also like’) to consumer-facing, real-world uses (e.g., voice recognition, robotics) will increase tensions between tech innovation and consumer distrust with data collection and use. Ultimately, that dynamic will put significant pressure to moving forward a national, comprehensive regulatory policy for consumer privacy”—Jenna Umbrianna, General Manager, Anagram

“Advertising is the science and art of persuasion. And persuasion is all about understanding, predicting and improving the science of human behavior. Artificial intelligence will bring us closer to an era when advertising is less annoying and more pleasing, useful, relevant and entertaining”—Tod Loofbourrow, CEO and Chairman, ViralGains

“An often overlooked aspect of AI is the human intelligence it is fused with. As people, we possess ingenuity, creativity, and innovative problem-solving abilities; this will likely remain irreplaceable by machines for the foreseeable future. Therefore, the real value of AI is realized when highly skilled individuals are directing and applying the technology to achieve solid business outcomes for brands. In 2020, advertisers will place a premium on having strong teams who can extract the maximum value from AI”—Matt Fanelli, SVP, Digital, MNI Targeted Media

“We’ve already seen a shift in intelligent assistants to push not pull, but we expect it to continue in 2020. The makers of intelligent assistants are moving away from a pull mentality and into a push mentality (this is referred to as a ‘proactive’ assistant). An example of this, if your phone learns your routine and realizes that you’ve deviated from it, say, due to traffic, then it can suggest bumping your upcoming appointments or sending a ‘running late’ message. Companies that understand this trend also understand that these use cases are only unlocked through AI”—Ben Johnson, VP, Mobile & Emerging Technology, Rightpoint

“As AI continues to move into the mainstream its hunger for data will continue to grow. The development of tools to quickly transform and integrate data to make it more accessible for constructing models will greatly reduce the time investment of data preparation. The result will free data scientists to apply their craft as well as allow smaller organizations to develop models without the need for large multifunctional teams”—Dr. Brandon Haynie, Chief Data Scientist, Babel Street

“Advancements in explainable AI will continue in 2020 and beyond as new standards are developed around the technical definition of explainability, slowly followed by new technologies to address the explainability problem for business leaders, non-technical audiences. In real estate, for example, offering a compelling explanation for why a mortgage application was rejected by an AI-driven platform will eventually be a necessity as AI adoption continues. Although we’ll see evolving technical tools and standards, progress for layperson tools will be slower with some narrow and domain-specific solutions emerging first. Like the general public’s understanding of ‘the web’ in the 90s, awareness, understanding and trust in AI will gradually increase as the capabilities and use of the technology spreads”—Sheldon Fernandez, CEO, DarwinAI

“Most people spend a significant amount of their time setting up meetings, preparing for meetings and getting IT equipment working. I envision that time shrinking in 2020 and in the coming years it will go to nothing (hopefully). Voice assistants for laptops and smartphones will continue to become more intelligent and support your everyday work needs on the go. For example, you will be able to say, ‘Open up the doc I was working on yesterday’ or ‘Find me David’s email from today.’ This trend will open up people’s time to be more productive and focused on higher-level work, not glued to their emails or texts”—Patrick Worfolk, CTO, Synaptics

“AI continues to receive lots of attention and massive investment dollars. As the hype cycle continues, it’s going to become more important for companies to focus on what really makes or breaks AI: the data. AI algorithms are only as good as the data that feeds them. In 2020, we’ll see AI companies that don’t have good, clean data, hit stumbling blocks as other companies with solid data flourish”—Chris Harrington, CEO, XANT

“We are now at a tipping point for business adoption of automation and AI. Businesses that incorporate automation in the right way, considering the customer experience and entire customer journey, will experience unprecedented growth. In 2020 and beyond, businesses that embrace conversational interactions with customers will see increased team efficiency, stronger customer relationships, and faster growth”—Fergal Reid, Principal Machine Learning Engineer, Intercom 

“In 2020, I expect to see profound advancements in AI across the healthcare sector. The complex, multivariate problems that abound in medicine—from biology to back office to the bedside—are ideal platforms for machine learning algorithms. There are many wrinkles still to work out, such as patient privacy, bias in training data, and balancing the collaboration just right between humans and algorithms, but none of these are insurmountable and can all be overcome with a thoughtful, disciplined approach. The potential gains are so large that I’m confident AI will make significant inroads in this field”—Dave Costenaro, Chief Data Officer, Capacity

“In 2020, AI and virtual human technology will be leveraged to improve leadership training by providing better insights into how we are applying our skills in realistic and emotionally engaging experiences. We are looking at people truly engaging with virtual personalities for the first time, which is made possible by AI removing the traditional communication barriers between humans and computers (in the form of voice input, speech recognition, and emotional analysis). This is happening in a way that will benefit true development of critical soft skills, creating a more social and communicative work environment”—Remmelt Blessinga, Product Manager, Talespin

“The most exciting thing that will continue to surge in AI is how it is helping us to better understand the world around us, from medicine to media. AI is empowering us to learn about music and content at a much deeper level, like how music fans actually listen so we can automatically deliver more engaging and entertaining listening experiences. Through AI we can now produce in a millisecond what in the past would have taken hours in a radio studio, and with advances in machine learning on the near horizon, it will only get better and faster in 2020”—Zack Zalon, Co-Founder and CEO, Super Hi-Fi

“Synthetic media will continue to improve allowing us to see ourselves in any GIF or transform our voice for use anywhere but that will lead to increasingly authentic deepfakes that allow people to easily assume and manipulate personas, creating added stress to cybersecurity”—Fred Schonenberg, Founder, VentureFuel

“AI will continue to provide a critical role in technology and marketing in 2020 and beyond. Leveraging AI and ML helps companies create more automation within their backend, ultimately helping to communicate more effectively with consumers. Being able to predict what a consumer wants and being able to serve them a custom experience (based on their interests/purchase patterns and history) will prove to be extremely valuable moving forward”—Chris Roebuck, Co-Founder and CEO, Clicktivated

“In 2020 and beyond, instead of users seeking and trying to determine what to watch next themselves, built-in predictive technology will suggest what content to watch and when, according to your unique taste profile and viewing habits. Dynamic recommendations will take into account not just users’ likes and preferences, but also life events, seasonal viewing habits, current affairs, and companion preferences”—Evelyn Watters, Founder and CEO, VUniverse

“The key difference for social media marketing in 2020 and beyond, lies in automation. Where previously, brands relied on social media managers or teams of people to create content and respond to customers’ queries online, this role will be increasingly replaced by chatbots and AI software, which will allow brands to have a 24/7 social presence. Machine learning algorithms will help companies optimize the social content they put out, based on their customers’ behavior on social media, and become better at offering individualized product recommendations at a segment-of-one level”—Redickaa Subrammanian, CEO, Resulticks

“2020 will be the year that AI goes mainstream in healthcare. After 2019, which was an early-adoption year, more medical centers will begin to realize the benefits of AI as word of mouth spreads among the community. Counter-intuitively, this will actually lead to fewer AI healthcare companies overall as there will be winners and losers”—Elad Walach, Co-founder and CEO, Aidoc

“AI will grow…through AI. The progress of AI will become exponential as AI-based technologies that actually build AI become more widely adopted. This is already beginning through methods such as neural architecture search and automated feature generation”—Shai Yanovski, VP of Data Science, Explorium

“As the need for more—and better—AI outstrips the availability of highly-trained data scientists and engineers, companies will turn to technology, training, and education, leveling-up their existing teams and involving more previously unheard voices in the process. This will help lead to less biased and more responsible AI”—Kurt Muehmel, Chief Customer Officer, Dataiku

“AI will drive sustainability in 2020 and beyond. By leveraging AI algorithms, companies can measure environmental and social impacts, automatically make responsible corrections, and optimize operations for sustainability. Though the sustainability challenge grows more complex every day, these technologies can help businesses to operate responsibly—and profitably—via reduced waste, more efficient production, smarter transportation strategies, and reduced resource consumption”—Dr. Michael Feindt, Strategic Advisor and Founder of Blue Yonder, a JDA company

“In 2020, more and more small business players will start proactively trying to adopt AI-powered technology but will be held back due to the prohibitive cost of available tools and a lack of understanding about ‘the machine.’ Software vendors that build AI in a way that’s easy to understand and affordable to the average business will see a huge advantage in gaining market share”—Tamara Grominsky, Director of Product Marketing, Unbounce

“In 2020, the companies that are going to be successful in operationalizing machine learning as part of their mission-critical processes will break organizational silos to form multi-disciplinary teams. These teams will include data engineers, application developers, and data scientists who will focus on applications rather than on data lakes. They will integrate machine learning native to the applications to avoid the data swamp”—Monte Zweben, CEO, Splice Machine

“Given the current state of AI technology, explainable AI is not a reasonable goal or expectation; however, we need to ensure that the new crop of machine learning-enabled data platforms have the necessary infrastructure to implement governance, transparency, and repeatability. If we can assess the data that goes into training a model beforehand, and continuously evaluate that model’s performance, then we can find the flaws in the system that produce unintentional bias and fix them—before we have to hear about them on Twitter”—Irina Farooq, Chief Product Officer, Kinetica

“Bots are no longer limited to simplistic customer interactions. They utilize natural language processing to better comprehend the user’s intent and deliver useful, appropriate responses. With more conversations being successfully navigated by bots, brands will increase their usage in order to improve response times and drive greater contact center efficiencies”—Ido Bornstein-HaCohen, CEO, Conversocial

“In 2020, we will see AR regarded as a business solution that solves problems across industries and changes the way businesses operate. AI and AR will continue to expand into new industries such as commercial real estate and other verticals within physical real estate such as malls and other retail facilities. Key product features will include AR for Indoor Navigation, AR search, AR ticketing systems. Leading apps/use cases will include apps for building maintenance and Operations, apps as central IoT controllers and digital concierge for access control and navigation of buildings”—Emil Alon, CEO, Resonai

“While investment in AI across the enterprise has grown tremendously, a major challenge in particular for IT professionals is measuring its ROI. AI-powered enterprise products have taken longer to produce than anticipated due to the challenges of building training datasets, the non-deterministic nature of machine learning, and the lack of maturity of machine learning platform tools. Regardless of these challenges, AI will have an influence across applications and industries that cannot be ignored”—Chris Ackerson, Director of Product Search and Artificial Intelligence, AlphaSense

“Artificial intelligence will be on full display at the Olympic Games in Tokyo next year. We can expect robotic assistants, powered by AI, to be part of publicity stunts leading up to the Games and actively helping officials during live events, like flagging ‘off-sides’ in football matches, for example. AI will also likely be involved in predicting polling and projections in the US presidential elections, further bringing this technology into the mainstream view”—Abhijit Sahay, Chief Transformation Officer-Data, Altimetrik

“Speech analytics tools were an important bridge to support Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and in 2020, we’ll see these two technologies continue to work hand-in-hand. We’re going to see the most progress in anticipating intent by layering emotion and sincerity with historical data in real-time. Over the next 1-2 years, we’ll be able to determine things like likelihood of person paying their past-due bill. This type of customer intent will end up being crucial for business analytics and planning”—Umesh Sachdev, CEO, Uniphore

“Thanks to significant advances in machine learning, 2020 will be the year that AI tackles the full scope of financial services. 2019 saw the rise of the robo advisor for assets, like investment management, but cracking the liabilities side of personal finance has proven much more difficult. Now AI has advanced to the point that it can take into account all the factors that go into debt management to make personalized and actionable recommendations for consumers”—Adrian Nazari, Co-Founder and CEO, Credit Sesame

“As a result of extensive data collection capabilities coupled with high powered accessible compute power, we’ll see AI and machine learning bolster manufacturing across numerous facets of the industry. The main focus will be on the customer, working to enhance their experience by delivering design speed, feedback and optimization. Secondarily, machine learning will vastly impact manufacturing efficiency to improve areas such as process control, error detection and demand anticipation, enabling more flexible supply chains”—Vicki Holt, CEO, Protolabs

“There will be a groundswell from grassroots thought leaders and startups to make AI fair, accountable and transparent. With this in mind, more Fortune 100 companies will look for ways to govern AI to minimize algorithmic risks and more states in the US will introduce regulations around AI. Explainable AI will soon become mainstream to help address these issues”—Krishna Gade, Co-founder and CEO, Fiddler

”In 2020, we will see applied AI and machine learning in auto insurance at scale. Mundane paperwork will be addressed with massive amounts of AI-based processes, while humans will be freed up to deliver a high-touch, personalized experience, offering policyholders emotional support after a traumatic event”—Githesh Ramamurthy, CEO, CCC Information Services

“AI will be integrated seamlessly and gradually into our day-to-day work to make us more efficient and effective in our jobs. Unlike the ‘killer robots’ people see in the movies, this type of automation will be nearly invisible. As more tasks become automated, leadership needs to prioritize continuous training for employees whose job responsibilities may shift. They’ll also need to emphasize soft skills when hiring—communication, teamwork, empathy—which we know can’t be replaced by an algorithm”—Christine Trodella, Head of Americas, Workplace, Facebook

“As AI continues to advance, 2020 will see devices and apps offer even more personalized services; this will be made possible through an increased understanding of user behavior and search patterns, allowing organizations to have a more in-depth view of user preferences and therefore deliver more human-centric experiences in real-time”—Phani Nagarjuna, Chief Analytics Officer, Sutherland

“In the future, everyone is going to adopt some type of AI technology as it becomes more and more critical. But just because teams know how to build AI doesn’t mean they know how to properly use it. You can build an algorithm for almost anything but that doesn’t mean it’s going to have utility in a business or have the ability to adapt new data. As complexity in software grows, understanding the difference between building AI and using it will be crucial as we head into 2020”—Jon Seaton, Director of Data Science, Functionize

“AI is revolutionizing the buying and selling of complex B2B services, traditionally left to analog processes, by understanding and responding to the complexities of human intent. Machine and deep learning are making it possible for users of complex B2B services to define and match complex requirements to ideal trading partners (suppliers) through an intuitive, needs-identification process and a vast understanding of potential trading partner strengths and capabilities. User experience continues to improve as AI becomes better informed about individual preferences and company requirements with every interaction, especially intangible areas like organizational culture and values”—Keith Hausmann, Chief Revenue Officer, Globality

“5G’s exceptional bandwidth and the applications that it enables, such as connected vehicles, will push a lot of the machine learning computation and model serving to the Telco Edge. This will require application developers to consume CDN-like services but for data processing and model serving. We will also start to see a lot more interesting applications of AI techniques in other fields”—Alex Bordei, VP of Product and Engineering, Lentiq

“AI will be used to find new ways to learn more about consumers of products and services in order to expose them to the content most likely to be of interest to them. While Facebook is an early adopter of AI from a marketing perspective, other platforms are following. Applications such as these with the ability to react to data through AI, machine learning, and predictive analytics are equipped to provide data-driven solutions to customers’ problems through more personalized support, process automation, and other features”—Dan Drechsel, Venture Capitalist, BIP Capital

“While AI and machine learning will increase the amount of automation in the workplace, only a small percentage of jobs will be completely replaced. What we’ll see instead is that humans will increasingly work side by side with machines. It’s happened in the past—from tractors on farms to spreadsheets in an office environment. The automation of mundane tasks or complicated analyses will help to enrich many job functions and allow individuals to focus more time and attention on the strategic needs of the business”—Julia Kanouse, CEO, Illinois Technology Association

“AI has been hyped-up for the past few years, but now we’re starting to see the true capabilities—and limitations—of the technology. While AI can make predictions, it’s missing the human element of adaptability to real-world scenarios. In general, the biggest missing link in AI today is lack of context and fluid domain expertise. To fill that void, in 2020 we will start to see increased utilization of contextual intelligence and the data needed to draw these insights such as user location, weather and more”—Dr. Hossein Rahnama, Founder and CEO, Flybits

“In 2020, we’ll see HR leaders leverage AI to better identify which employees may be on the verge of quitting. As HR data sets expand with new elements such as survey responses, employee peer to peer recognition and employee engagement levels in HR communication platforms, so will the quality of the algorithms in their ability to assess employee sentiment. For HR leaders looking to better determine the attitudes that drive employee turnover and increase retention, using AI to provide insights into employee engagement will be crucial”—Steve Beauchamp, CEO, Paylocity

“In 2020, AI will be used to help companies drive automation in their processes by doing work accurately enough to replace tasks previously completed only by humans. When AI is leveraged correctly, it can help recruiters identify areas where they can eliminate bias, such as within job descriptions. AI is not likely ready to make final hiring selections, but it will significantly speed up many steps that are completed by recruiters today”—Adam Godson, Chief Technology and Product Innovation Officer, Cielo

“In 2020, we expect AI to be used more frequently in the employment-based immigration space to provide attorneys, human resource leaders and foreign talent with a more seamless and less stressful immigration process. By integrating AI and technology into the immigration process, HR leaders will be armed with the resources, tools and data they need to sponsor foreign nationals and manage immigration programs with thoughtfulness, efficiency and continued compliance”—Richard Burke, CEO, Envoy Global 

“In 2020, we expect to see talent acquisition teams continue to use AI to drive fairness, better predict fit for hire, streamline processes, and improve the candidate experience. Talent acquisition teams will also use AI to better predict the likelihood of candidate success on the job, implement bias control and provide candidates with real-time feedback. As AI continues to play a major role in hiring, organizations must ensure their recruiting technology benefits individual candidates and adopts open standards that are transparent, verifiable, reproducible and publishable”—Eric Sydell, Ph.D., EVP of Innovation, Modern Hire

“Higher education will continue to see the value of implementing AI-based solutions as we head into 2020. We will see a growing use of AI in learning tools that can measure and predict usage across a variety of subjects, particularly in STEM, in order to provide students with more personalized pathways to success. Additionally, AI advancements in qualitative analyses of writing—including argument structure, relevance and tone—will lead to the increased use of AI-based writing solutions in higher ed”—Kanuj Malhotra, President of Digital Student Solutions, BNED

“As businesses move from implementation to evaluation in 2020, we will begin to see AI’s popular use cases change. Companies that adopted AI solutions with the intention to impress customers and employees with unexpected or over the top interactions, won’t see the same results as companies that use AI to simplify interactions in the most efficient manner, like prefilling paperwork. AI’s true strength will be revealed—removing cumbersome tasks to provide stakeholders with consistent, positive interactions that make their daily lives easier”—Zviki Ben-Ishay, Co-Founder and CEO, Lightico