Council Post: 10 AI Predictions For The Next 10 Years

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Nir Kalderois chief AI officer at NEORIS and Adjunct Executive for AI at CEMEX.

The past several years have been an exciting period for artificial intelligence (AI). We used to think of it as science fiction, yet today, AI has become an everyday component of life. This is especially true with advances during the global pandemic. The technology behind AI continues to evolve at a fast pace, and I believe this will only accelerate in the future.

Here, based on my experience in the AI field, I list 10 major predictions that will have a broad impact on the way we conduct education, business, healthcare and many other aspects of our lives over the next decade and beyond.

1. Reaping rewards will be among the most important trends over the next 10 years. I believe companies will be rewarded for their efforts moving from models either in pilots or MVPs to full deployment at a large scale. Companies will fully complete the first phase of becoming data-driven or speeding-to-insight through the full consolidation of their data into the multicloud and hybrid cloud environment. This will allow them to harness the power of their data and AI for every strategic and important business problem and decision. Importantly, moving to the cloud will not be a massive radical operation anymore.

2. The cloud will gain even more presence, but there will be a shift toward open-source technology services blended into a company's cloud environment. Among the major reasons, cloud consumption cost is becoming too expensive as we scale up models in production. It reaches close to a point where the benefits are channelized by the major costs, and companies will have to figure this out. Still, I believe current cloud service costs will decline over time following the tendency of any technology as it proliferates. In contrast, though, this trend will also be met with more powerful yet pricey services around operations at the scale of AI.

3. When it comes to MLOps at the core and scale, we will see massive movement in terms of skills from "building a model" to "fully deploying models." As this trend peaks, however, we must also pair its evolution of the field by increasing the number of machine learning (ML) engineers to prevent employment bottlenecks.

4. We will continue to see more blending methods and inputs for a greater good. Already, we see how blending different data inputs and techniques can help to create better models that are also less expensive to train. Image recognition blended with natural language processing (NLP) techniques will continue to dominate and improve model performances as we move closer to a digital world with infinite interactions to leverage over "movements" (images) and both written and spoken text.

5. Data-driven will not be a "nice to have" anymore. This old-school approach of continuously looking at data and the insight it can provide to inform and adjust decision-making will simply become more naturally intuitive to our minds and organizational culture. This will allow us to better enjoy life as we generate efficiencies that enable a true work-life balance and better explore available opportunities.

6. The multiverse of all will be in the spotlight. AI has a key role to play in Web3 and the digital metaverse world. Just imagine the amount of data we will be collecting from smart-home IoT devices, the internet, mobile phones, computers, Apple Watches, cars and so on to generate real-time recommendations and paths to effectively consume products and services in the metaverse. It will be huge, efficient and, most of all, exciting to see how merging and blending data from myriad devices we use in various aspects of our lives will yield interesting recommendations to improve our well-being. In this area, I believe that over the next 10 years, gaming engineers will build spaces, and AI will fill it with content relevant to each one of us.

7. For the second decade in a row, blockchain, crypto and AI will continue to make it into the headlines. Every individual component of the metaverse depends on them. This implies more data, more computing power at cheaper costs (reduced energy costs to run blockchain, for example) and more AI to check, regulate, validate and make recommendations as we move into the near future.

8. Quantum computing power is here to stay and grow, though the trend has negative implications for crypto, blockchain and even cybersecurity. I expect quantum power will expand to the same level we have supercomputing power and services available in the cloud with equivalent security standards. Among potential uses, quantum power allows us to dive deeper into healthcare data while optimizing manufacturing and the supply chain. Already, companies have gained real business benefits on the production line—leveraging millions of material combinations—to create superior products that will be more ecological and with ever-higher standards. On the medicine side and material science, we see ongoing experimentation to break the generic drug industry by using quantum power to create personalized drugs from patient data and nearly unlimited available materials across the globe.

9. An increasing number of emerging enterprises will focus on technology to increase automation and become cost-efficient. Companies will continue to scale their operations with technology while being less human-operated in their day-to-day functions. It will push our generation and the ones to follow to become more subject matter experts focusing on tasks requiring human involvement at high non-intuitive tasks.

10. I believe deep learning will evolve as smaller models into an ecosystem of large AI systems. Individual and independent "small" models will be created from high-quality, versatile data. Once perfected, those "small" ML models will be part of a larger AI ecosystem. Graph representation will also be part of this interconnectivity, helping optimize the search for trained data and knowledge built and developed as part of this interchangeable AI system designed to solve massive complex tasks.

These changes and more will have a profound impact on our lives over the next 10 years. I cannot wait for the future.

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