AI 2020 – Everything to know about key trends and beyond

After the dominance of internet, perhaps the next thing to revolutionize our lives will be Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. AI has already been used extensively in the technologies we use in our everyday lives. It has so far fostered the creation of personalised user experience. We all have experienced this when Amazon predicts things we might be interested to buy, or YouTube populates our feed with precisely the videos we want to see, or Netflix shows us a personalised thumbnail that will pique our interest. It has also been used in self-driving cars, facial recognition technology, and governance.

There is no doubt that these changes and used cases will only intensify in the coming decade, making it the AI decade. We should also look into what more it will make possible, what socio-political changes it will usher, and what wondrous things only conceived of in lore, it will bring to reality. So what is in store for AI and ML in 2020? We can analyse the trends and make pretty accurate guesses.

• AI in healthcare: As more and more industries adopt AI-based technologies, one that will perhaps benefit the most from it is healthcare. The use of AI in healthcare will transform how records are handled. With the use of AI-backed technology, the record-keeping process can be automated, reducing human dependencies and freeing up critical human resources to serve in care work.
  
  According to Business standard, human error causes 5 million hospital deaths in India every year. This can be reduced by relying on automated records, using AI to automatically initialise equipment calibration, and centralise data to make it easily accessible. It will be possible to source medical records of patients from multiple hospitals in real-time. This will also reduce decision-making times, by offering reliable data-backing to critical decisions.
  
  Another effect that AI will have is to reduce costs by making it possible to predict health emergencies, by analysing data and deriving interesting insights, making predictive healthcare a reality for the masses.
  
  
• AI in business: As companies evolve, many aspects of the business will be automated to reduce human error and optimise business processes. Repetitive tasks like filing reports, filling forms, generating reports, and generating graphs out of data will be automated. This is critical when it comes to operationalising enterprise data because it will be used to provide access to contextualised data to all employees, involving in better utilisation of enterprise data and improved decision-making.
  
  On a consumer-facing front, big companies and start-ups alike can use consumer data to create more personalised experiences, thereby improving user experience and developing custom-made user interfaces. The apps you use in your everyday life and daily usage patterns and help predict your needs. On the backend, these apps will be able to consolidate data from unique profiles to better understand users and offer unique experiences to delight consumers.

• AI in manufacturing: 2020 will be the year when manufacturers embrace AI for the production line. This will be one of the biggest liabilities for manufacturers in quality control. Human error has a significant cost attached to it, and frequently jeopardises worker security on the production line. By automating mundane processes, factories can keep production running 24/7, minimise human error, and eliminate human interaction with parts of the process that might be dangerous thereby reducing industrial accidents.
  
  One problem that companies have faced is that there seems to be a significant cost associated with saving the immense quantity of data on the cloud. However, with the development of technologies like edge AI, that allows companies to organise their data without having a link on the cloud, AI technologies are becoming more accessible to them. More and more companies are expected to lean into edge technologies in order to run factories.
  
  
• AI in drug–discoveries: Human error in pharmaceutical industries can be life-threatening. As governments and international health agencies push to eradicate more communicable diseases, and with increasing population, especially in emerging economies, pharmaceutical companies need to automate in order to meet the demand. Currently, years are wasted in trials, and manually documenting those results in order to get regulatory approvals.
  
  Pharmaceutical companies are already using AI-based technologies to simulate drug interactions and shortlist harmful drug interactions, in order to tweak their drugs. This trend will continue and get more extensive as companies seek to reduce development cycles of new drugs. This will serve to reduce R&D costs of drugs, incentivising smaller players to enter the market. In the end, the winner will be patients who will have more choices and reduced prices.
  
  
• AI in developing multimedia: Use ofAI-based technology is likely to increase in media production as companies strive for more realistic visual effects, and reduce the cost of production. We have already seen how AI can dramatically create powerful visuals in the form of an aging Robert DeNiro in the Netflix movie The Irishman. Similarly, as Indian film industries lean into creating mega big-budget action epics like Bahubali and 2.0, they’re likely to benefit from increased AI- integration in movies.
  
  In video games, ML and AI is going to be used more and more to create real-world interactions within games. Games like Red Dead Redemption 2 have already been hailed by critics and consumers for creating powerful experiences as a response to human interactions. On another front, as game developers opt for the In-game purchase model of monetization, ML and AI help to understand individual in-game behaviour patterns and create personalised prompts to get people to purchase more thereby increasing revenue.

AI and ML-based technologies are changing our world. Not all of these changes will be good, of course. There are trade-offs, as with any technology. The creation of deep fakes, or digitally altered hyper-realistic videos will be devastating to our perception of the truth. Increased personalised content targeting on social media has been accused of creating silos thereby increasing polarisation in society, and threatening geo-political stability. These changes will have to be managed and the damage will need to be mitigated. However, the reduced cost of commerce, target resource delivery to consumers, and increased accessibility of public benefits are some of the reasons why AI technology will see continued investment, and the 2020s will be an AI-dominated decade.