AI, Artificial Intelligence concept,3d rendering,conceptual image.

As I covered in a recent post for Forbes.com, this year has seen notable breakthroughs in AI (Artificial Intelligence).They have included innovations about algorithmslike GANs or Generative Adversarial Networksas well as advances in categories like NLP (Natural Language Processing), just to name a few.

Then what can we expect in 2020?Well, it seems likely that the innovations will continue at a rapid pace.

So heres a look at what we may see:

Anand Rao, the Global and US Artificial Intelligence Leader at PwC:

2020 will be the year of practical AI: using cool technology to solve boring problems. Business leaders are recalibrating their ambitions, with just 4% intending to scale AI across the organization. Instead, many are focusing on functional areas like finance, compliance, HR, and tax and universal pain points like extracting data from forms. In our survey, executives ranked using AI to operate more efficiently and increase productivity as the top-two benefits they expect from AI in the coming year.

Sanjeev Katariya, the VP/Chief Architect of eBay AI & Platforms:

From an ecommerce lens, AI will continue to grow, building adaptive and highly personalized markets and bridging borders while extending itself to places on the planet that need to see explosive growthwho in 2020, will gladly join the ecommerce revolution.

Michael Kopp, the Head of Data Science at HERE Technologies:

Deep Learning goes industrial. Dedicated DL chipsets are accelerating trial and error opportunities across industries, allowing diverse fields to build critical new models and AI components that solve real-world data problems.

Bryan Friehauf, the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Enterprise Software, ABB:

In 2020, AI will be the mainstream recommendation engine for the industrial sector. In energy management in particular, there is a huge opportunity. AI can provide facility managers with accurate power consumption predictions, which enables them to take timely action to reduce unplanned consumption spikes through rescheduling or switching off non-critical loads. AI will be the technology that takes simulations to the next level, helping to locate unstable areas of the grid and increase safety for workers in the field.

Steve Grobman, the Chief Technology Officer at McAfee:

In general, adversaries are going to use the best technology to accomplish their goals, so if we think about nation-state actors attempting to manipulate an election, using deepfake video to manipulate an audience makes a lot of sense. Adversaries will try to create wedges and divides in society.

Jake Saper, a Partner at Emergence Capital:

"In 2020, we will see the tech industry shift its focus away from using AI to drive automation and move it towards employing AI for augmentation. We'll realize that human-to-human jobs, which most often include dynamic input and feedback, are at their core still best performed by humans. In those cases, AI is ideally suited to augment, and not replace, human jobs."

Andy Ellis, the Chief Security Officer at Akamai:

What well see in many spaces is folks starting to understand the limitations of algorithmic solutions, especially where those create, amplify, or ossify bias in the world; and companies buying technologies will really need to start understanding how that bias impacts their operations.

Steve Wood, the Chief Product Officer at Boomi, a Dell Technologies business:

Overzealous data analyses have brought many companies face to face with privacy lawsuits from consumers and governments alike, which in turn has led to even stricter data governance laws. Understandably concerned about making similar mistakes, businesses will begin turning to metadata for insights in 2020, rather than analyzing actual data.

Jay Gurudevan, the Principal Product Manager of AI/ML at Twilio:

Well see more enterprises and businesses leverage AI tools and automated communication to better understand the entire customer journey. As consumers become more comfortable interacting with AI agents, Natural Language Processing will become more accurate and advanced and implementation will expand.

Avon Puri, the CIO of Rubrik:

An ecosystem of technologies will emerge that leverage intelligence, such as RPA technologies, and will provide new efficiencies in business processes that werent possible before. Next year is when new intelligent technologies will really take off, and RPA will lead automated intelligence in the enterprise.

Umesh Sachdev, the CEO and co-founder of Uniphore:

Speech analytics tools were an important bridge to support automation, and the same AI aiding humans behind the scenes will aid bots and enable the era of platforms. In 2020, heres where were going to see the most progress: anticipating intent by layering emotion and sincerity with historical data in real time. We'll be able to determine things like the likelihood of person paying their past-due bill.

Rama Sekhar, a partner at Norwest:

2020 will usher in the year of AI in the Enterprise. AI will get an upgrade from being an ingredient to a first class citizen as CIOs will introduce AI-first initiatives, just as they adopted cloud-first initiatives five years ago. Companies will have to justify why theyre not using AI in their own software, processes, and workflows in 2020.

Stefan Nandzik, the Vice President of Product & Brand Marketing at Signifyd:

In 2020, well see a spate of lawsuits filed by aggrieved consumers who have been wrongly barred from returning goods to retailers, or buying goods from ecommerce merchants, or renting home shares, or benefiting from Uber rides by algorithmically driven screening schemes. And well see the first significant pieces of legislation codifying consumers rights when it comes to AIcreating demand for liable machines.

Dr. Hossein Rahnama, the CEO of Flybits:

Startups are realizing that no matter how good their algorithm is, big companies aren't comfortable just handing over their sensitive datasets and core assets. So as the industry continues to mature over the next year, AI entrepreneurs will recognize that they have to shed their grad school mindset of give me the data and Ill do my work because that is no longer the case. This realization will force AI entrepreneurs to focus on more than just algorithms and shift their attention toward solidifying a data strategy that includes governance, management, encryption and tokenization. Because at the end of the day, without a strong data strategy, your AI strategy means nothing.

Chris Nicholson, the CEO of Pathmind:

One of the most promising areas of AI applications in 2020 will combine different, powerful forms of AI. Deep learning is used in a lot of perceptive tasks that answer the question: what am I looking at? For example, deep learning could recognize a grizzly bear in a photograph. Reinforcement learning is used in a lot of strategic tasks that answer the question: what should I do? For example, should I run away, stand in place or play dead? If you combine the two, then you get a powerful sequence of machine learning decisions you can combine. In this example: Given that I see a grizzly bear ahead of me, I should play dead. (Pro tip: grizzlies can run 35 miles per hour, but they do not eat carrion.) So those combinations of smart perceptions combined with smart actions vastly extend the value of AI. We move beyond simple classification into much higher ROI tasks that have implications for businesses, robotics, self-driving cars and video games.

Dr. Alex Liu, the Chief Data Scientist for IBM and the founder of RMDS Lab:

There will be more exploration of causality, which is the next generation of data analysis. It will be going from what to why. This will be crucial in improving the success rate of AI, which is still fairly low.

Tom (@ttaulli) is the author of the book,Artificial Intelligence Basics: A Non-Technical Introduction.

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AI (Artificial Intelligence): What We Can Expect In The New Year - Forbes