AI and automation is set to transform every corner of the business world in 2018, and we can expect to see more organisations recognise the positive disruption that automation can bring. For many businesses currently, AI and automation is seen as a considerable threat. 

However, next year, AI will increasingly be seen as a force for good in business, and something that will only adapt jobs – and even create news ones, as Gartner suggests. Perceptions are already changing, albeit slowly, in a wide range of industries including finance, with global research from Sage revealing that accountants have a huge appetite for automation. 

The good news is some finance departments have already quenched their thirst for automation. Purchase Invoice Automation (PIA), for example, has become a key part of many organisations finance transformation plans. Next year, we can expect to see more organisations automating financial processes, removing mundane tasks that can be effectively streamlined by disruptive technology. These time savings will free up staff to focus on more high-value, strategic roles – such as ensuring the finance team provides the data-driven insight to the rest of the business about new opportunities and trends, so that businesses can take informed decisions based on the numbers.

Using modern business analytics, like AI and machine learning (ML), can massively increase productivity. It can make work more efficient through defining better processes, reducing manual data work, and getting real time decision support information into the hands of employees. This is something the UK in particular needs, as highlighted in The Chancellor of the Exchequer’s recent budget. 

That is one way the value of data can be delivered, making the Chancellor’s planned investment in AI and maths education welcome. However I see another aspect of data value that warrants attention.
Companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook are built on assembling and understanding data. They have multi-billion dollar valuations. Many of the software systems that they use to manage and understand this data are open source, available for free. That indicates that the unique data they hold, which trains their systems and their algorithms, has intrinsic value.

With such clear examples of data value, I believe that in 2018 investors and hence boards need to start to look at ways to attribute a tangible value to an organisation’s unique data, and the algorithms that analyse it.

In the artificial intelligence and machine learning space, in 2018 we will see the rise of the intelligent application. A surprise from 2017 is the realisation that while these applications are beginning to become more mainstream, they are actually already among us and are only going to continue to get more prominent in our workflows. Also in 2018 there will be widespread enterprise adoption of a standard workflow for building artificial intelligence applications. This will continue to push AI enabled applications into the mainstream.

We will see multi-faceted developments, including an explosion of supply side investment, some investor disappointment and a backlash against the ‘hype,’ concentrated around protest against the impact of AI on jobs.

Underneath all of that, there will be some incredible developments in the application of AI in important parts of society. As we re-wire businesses and institutions to take advantage of the ‘new machine’, we have unprecedented opportunity to make things – including work – better. AI will help doctors become better doctors and teachers become better teachers, through supporting them and taking away some rote tasks. AI won’t destroy jobs, but make them more effective, productive and satisfying. Human imagination, wants and needs are inexhaustible – AI will help us imagine and create the next level of work from which the vast majority of people will benefit.

We are going to see a radical change in 2018 and beyond as AI techniques both become more productive, and tools become more transparent and user friendly.

This will have a particular impact in scientific research and publishing, improving productivity and efficiency. Recent research from Stanford University found that since the 1930s, the effective number of researchers at work has increased by a factor of 23, but productivity has actually declined.

AI will help to overcome these barriers – improving outcomes for humanity by helping researchers to solve the problems we face globally in diverse areas – from antibiotic resistance, to environmental degradation and climate change.

Siri, Alexa, Cortana, Google: enabled by rapid advances in voice recognition and artificial intelligence, voice assistants have become a key consumer technology. 

But voice assistants have been slower to emerge in business applications, as they pose unique challenges: access to disparate enterprise data and deep understanding of business context and processes. This becomes apparent if we consider the complexity and domain knowledge required to execute an instruction such as: “Get all documents and set a final review of product X launch.” Such basic tasks are in fact quite complicated and highly variable between different industries, companies and even individual projects. 

Yet, voice assistants in business hold the potential for far greater productivity and economic impact, especially when coupled with UCaaS, and further integrated with team collaboration and contact centers. Consider the power of having a business voice assistant as a virtual participant in a team collaboration workspace, including participation in conference calls.

It can be available to retrieve documents and information at everyone’s request, and over time I see it beginning to proactively offer assistance based on the collaboration context. 

Artificial intelligence is still very much in its infancy. Despite all the hype, no AI technology has yet passed the Turing Test - a test of a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.

But the advances of faster computing multiplied by advances in algorithmic computing – Machine Learning or AI - have been breath-taking. While AI-driven solutions have been great at correlation none of them has yet mastered causation, and AI technologies are not yet that applicable in everyday business situations.

The average business doesn’t have the resources available like Amazon with Alexa. But they need to apply AI driven solutions to specific elements of their own business – the efficiency driven approach of deploying AI. Approached in this way, AI can have a massive impact for any business, deepening customer understanding to prevent churn and increase loyalty is a great example.

The usability and technological adoption of voice searches over the coming 12 months will determine how you plan your strategy, and where you start playing in the space. Realistically, Amazon and Google are going to be the two big players so you’ll have to consider SEO and AEO (Amazon engine optimisation) implications. This means taking into consideration how people talk, as well as how they type.

To stay ahead of the game, your business needs to invest in smart advertising and skill building – now.A great example of how this can work well for a company is Dominos (who now class themselves as a tech company). They are building skills within Alexa that are so user-friendly, customers don’t even need to move to get their pizza delivered to them anymore.

All they need to do is ask “Alexa, ask Domino’s to feed me”. If you’re able to imitate or learn from this model by considering how you can make your customers’ lives easier then you’re on to a winning formula, and have the potential to maximise your commercial benefit.

In 2018 AI will allow retailers to understand customers’ preferences as well as their five closest friends do, if not better. AI will memorise their browsing pages, purchases, likes, clicks and most intimate wishes. While this might sound Orwellian, it also means you will be able to take a cognitive load off of your customers’ minds and offer a more pleasant customer experience.

AI in 2018 will also bring SEO-voice activation, which is an as-yet unexplored opportunity for online marketers. What if, rather than being overwhelmed by choice, your customer knows exactly what they want? All they need to do is take out their phone and talk to it. It is your job, however, to make sure that your business is SEO-optimised and comes up in top lists of voice search results. The applications of Siri and Alexa will become far-reaching. Even if your customers are not looking for anything particular, but are merely enquiring about the weather, their phones will be smart enough to suggest the timely purchase of an umbrella. Or 20 minutes later, when the sun re-emerges, a pair of sunglasses.

Retargeting ads will have real-time applications to benefit your business, and will offer important customer usability.
It seems like the evolution of AI will first be preceded with the evolution of actual intelligence in 2018.

Online marketers will be benefiting from unprecedented knowledge of their customers. By taking advantage of this knowledge, they will be able to guide their behaviour in desired ways more easily. This will be done by offering personalised real-time recommendations, enhancing  cognitive biases, being interactive and generally bridging the gap between customer and salesperson. 

In the security domain, we’ll start to see trickle-down effects in terms of artificial intelligence as we move forward. If you think about the hierarchy of those working in AI, you’ve got DeepMind at the very top, along with Google and other major companies.

They are all doing some seriously exciting, specialised intelligence work that is pushing the boundaries of what is possible through these systems. As these companies continue to innovate, the security industry will begin to use their more advanced techniques and systems to the benefit of our own products.

As we move forward, it seems that AI will also be used specifically to try and combat the skills gap in cybersecurity. It’s well established that there simply aren’t enough people with the requisite skills within the industry, so it’s up to vendors and their partners to supply these services or make their products as easy to use as possible, to minimise the technical skill needed to run them.

We’ll see a real move towards AI being made as simple and useful as possible for teams to use while the industry looks to address the skills gap.

We’ve already started to see a rise in the use of AI bots placing more targeted phishing adverts and emails, analysing large amounts of social media information to profile their targets. Online chat bots are also being seen more and more in use for customer service – therefore positioning them as a system that people trust.

Attackers will look to use this trust and build chatbots to try and obtain bank details from people – so expect a rise in the amount of malicious chatbots found on the internet.

Artificial intelligence enabled through cloud platforms will begin permeating across enterprises, industries and applications. While we aren’t quite at the level of HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey, technologies like Alexa, Cortana and Siri are demonstrating the power and potential impact of AI in everyday life. 

For businesses, capabilities of machine learning, powered by petabytes of data and insanely fast compute resources will impact consumer experiences, biotech research, financial modeling and myriad other applications. Key to this is letting AI remove the mundane tasks and letting existing specialist human teams focus on other factors critical for business growth and development.

AI skills, such as pattern recognition and decision making, played an important role in the much-talked about AlphaGo win against expert (human) player, Lee Sedol. The most ground-breaking technique AlphaGo demonstrated, however, was reinforcement learning, which is the tendency to produce an action that is followed by an increase in reward. Algorithms based on reinforcement learning are already available. In 2018, they will be applied to autonomous vehicles on the road and robots on factory floors.

Over the next year, interest in AI will grow across every industry. By 2020, the AI market will grow to $47bn. But how will these investments pay off for the enterprise? Equipped with AI and cognitive systems, big data analytics, and machine learning, the insights-driven intelligent enterprise will outpace its competition.

Better data will mean better algorithms, and better algorithms will mean better data, and so on. We will become much more productive as we offload collecting and processing data to AI systems. The intelligent enterprise will leverage agile development to build apps in the cloud, automate processes and menial tasks to optimise efficiency and explore data lakes for sophisticated insights and better decision making.

A long list of bold statements have been made about AI over the last few years, with people stating that it will take over our jobs, the way we shop or even our household chores – or completely replace any form of human interaction.

The fact is, AI’s main value at the moment is in making people better and more efficient at what they do – especially when it comes to businesses communicating with their customers.

Next year, I predict that we will see AI put to real use not in replacing the human customer experience, but in augmenting it.
 
For instance, a transport company can use AI to power an SMS service or a messaging app like Facebook messenger gathering customer feedback – performing initial analysis so that the customer experience team can act on that feedback and improve services for the future, rather than spending their time contacting every customer who travels with the company.

Similarly, the financial sector can use AI to evaluate credit scores, so financial advisors can provide the customer with more accurate advice – without ever placing sole responsibility for advice on AI’s shoulders.

Whatever the use of AI, companies should not get overexcited about what the new capabilities will mean for the business, and ensure that they’re still communicating with their customers in the right way, at the right time and with the right message. Otherwise they simply run risk of alienating customers and appearing out of touch with what they want.