Of the six important
transformative technologies tracked by
Digital Orbit, the new executive briefing from IHS Markit,
Artificial Intelligence (AI) will have the largest impact in the
next three years, research from the study indicated.
The finding from Digital Orbit showed AI garnering the highest
score in 9 out of 10 measures on impact, a key metric used by the
study to gauge how influential each technology will be across a
range of industries.
All told, AI was well ahead of second-ranked Cloud and four
other technologies, including
5G,
Blockchain,
IoT, and
Video Everywhere / Ubiquitous Video, as shown by the graphic
below.
The high AI score on impact was awarded by Digital Orbit’s two
focus groups: IHS Markit analysts on the one hand, and a select
pool of industry and corporate leaders on the other. Members of the
latter group also serve as respondents to the Key Influencer
Survey, which appraises the prospects and significance of each
transformative technology.
Drivers of AI’s elevated standing
Artificial Intelligence owes its lofty standing on impact to at
least two factors.
For one, AI is at an especially powerful moment of development.
The technology is advanced enough for its anticipated impact to be
meaningful, but it is also at a relatively early stage of growth
and expansion that analysts and potential industry adopters alike
believe its greatest impact still lies ahead.
Also accounting for AI’s high impact score is the collective
sense that more technological advancements are in store for the
field. Simply put, the AI of today will not be the AI of
tomorrow.
For instance, AI is deployed in most applications today to
handle or control specific tasks, a stage of development commonly
referred to as “narrow AI” or “weak AI.” The AI of the future, in
comparison, will be game-changing, resulting in a much broader
transformative impact on a variety of industries, endowed with a
greater capacity for human-like intelligence while also able to
process data at unprecedented speed.
Moving forward, driving advancements in AI will be breakthroughs
in computer processing power and communications technology, which
in turn will spur an explosion of collectable and analyzable data.
A cloud-AI-based deployment will also help advance AI further,
enabling more computing power to tap into artificial neural
networks (ANN) or deep learning networks, both of which require
data centralization and massive computation.
AI’s high readiness score a red flag?
Aside from achieving high marks on impact, AI scored strongly on
readiness, the other key measure in Digital Orbit, which evaluates
the readiness for adoption of each transformative technology across
various industries. The high score here was driven largely by
feedback from the Key Influencer Survey, with most respondents
believing AI will be adopted quickly in their industries.
On this front, however, IHS Markit believes the high readiness
score of AI requires closer examination. It is possible that the
current rapid adoption of AI in initial applications, combined with
the considerable media hype showered on the technology, might be
giving rise to misconceptions—or even downright erroneous
notions—about AI’s readiness for wider-scale implementation.
And given that many industries are still figuring out how to best
utilize or deploy this powerful but relatively new technology, the
high readiness score of AI strikes IHS Markit as even more of a
surprise.
From this standpoint, the readiness of AI is likely lower than
many would expect. In fact, AI adoption will vary greatly,
depending on the industry adopting AI and on the use case for the
technology. While the future of AI is bright, its
implementation—especially in complex human-level AI
applications—will take time.
Josh Builta is senior principal analyst for
transformative technologies at IHS Markit
Posted 4 June 2019