Technology predictions for 2017
Contributed By - Hari Gottipati
Happy New year!!! I hope you all had a great holiday season!!!
2016 has seen a vortex of change in technologies, particularly in the areas of AI (artificial intel-ligence), AR (augmented reality) / VR (virtual reality) and of course Big Data. PokemonGo proved that AR/VR is not a fiction and it’s going to stay here. Self-driving cars showed AI and Big Data are going to drive automation. AI powered Contextual Digital Personal Assistants and Chatbots proved that context is the glue between systems and humans for conversations. Well, 2017 is going to witness more advancements in these areas.
AI is going to be everywhere
In 2016, we have seen AI written movie script (Sunspring - a short science fiction film), AI cut movie trailer (Morgan movie trailer), chatting with dead people using Chatbots (Luka Chatbot), robotic teaching assistant (Jill Watson - robotic TA created by Georgia Tech professor Ashok Goel), self-driving cars (Google, Uber etc.) / trucks (Otto), an algorithm (JPMorgan) detecting the rogue employees, Google’s AlphaGO system beat world champion etc. Undoubtedly, 2016 was the rise of AI and 2017 would mark the year of beginning of mainstream AI. It will become an integral part of IT strategy for many companies.
According to IDC 2017 IT industry predictions, 40% of the DX (digital transformation) initiatives and 100% of IoT initiatives will be supported by AI capabilities by 2019. By 2018, 75% of devel-oper teams will include AI functionality in one of the applications/services.
AI is also on Forrester’s 2017 technology prediction list. Using the collected data, AI will provide deeper contextual insights as well as personalized experiences. Forrester predicts that invest-ments in AI will triple as firms look to tap into complex systems, advanced analytics, and machine learning technology.
AR/VR is going to drive more digital/virtual experiences
In July of 2016, Gartner predicted that AR/VR would take another 5 to 10 years to kick off, well, PokemonGo has shown they are wrong. Everyone thought AR/VR couldn’t be a success unless VR headsets or Google glasses takes off, but, Nintendo and Niantic disproved by tapping into the 5 billion smartphones without needing a VR headset. If you provide the right content with the right experience, people are going to embrace AR/VR faster than you can imagine. PokemonGo at-tracted 100 million users in 6 days while the other popular game Candy Crush took one year three months to reach 100 million users.
IDC predicts that 30% of consumer-facing Global 2000 companies will experiment AR/VR as part of their marketing experiments in 2017. In 2018, the monthly active base of consumers using mobile augmented reality apps will exceed 400M. Over 20% of commercial media if not all social media on Facebook will be 360/VR by 2020.
Data and Analytics are going to provide more value
According to McKinsey’s 2016 analytics study, U.S. retailer supply chain operations who are leveraging data and analytics have seen 19% increase in operating margins over the last five years. Retailers are using data and analytics to improve merchandising including pricing and placement optimization. For example, Walmart uses spikes in social network chatter to predict demand for out-of-the-ordinary products. By tapping into social media, Walmart captures meta-data containing customers, topics, products, locations, and events. By combing these data streams with customer data, sales data, financial data and mobile data, Walmart obtains a com-plete overview of their customers. Also, Walmart changes its prices roughly 50,000 times a month.
There are lots of opportunities for business to generate/predict new insights which will help them to drive more sales, improve efficiencies and increase operating margins. A shift from simple algorithms to sophisticated AI will drive powerful and useful predictive analytics, and 2017 is going to witness that shift.
Cloud adoption will continue to rise
Cloud is already an integral part of many companies today, and the adoption is going to increase further. IDC predicts 67% of enterprise IT infrastructure and software will be for Cloud-based offering by 2020. The confidence in Cloud is also growing, and it will become trusted by 2020 with security, encryption, and compliance enhanced by technologies lie Block Chain. 60% of the IT will be done off-premise by 2018 and by 2020, top 5 Cloud providers control at least 75% share vs. about 50% in 2016.
Data Scientist is still the demanding job
In the LinkedIn list of top 2017 skills, statistical analysis and data mining retained the second spot (Cloud and distributed computing have remained in the #1 spot for the past two years). On indeed.com, searches and the number of job postings for data scientist are always growing. SQL, R, Python, SPSS, Tableau, and Hadoop are leading tools used by Data Scientists. Based on the recent job postings, 65% need to know Python, 53% need to have R programming skills, 50% need to know SQL and have machine learning development skills. As per paysa.com, a site which analyses jobs and salaries, the average base salary for Data Scientists is $117K per year, ranging from $89.2K to $242K. Data scientist is ranked the best job in America because of its high earning potential, career opportunities, and the number of the job openings.