Inspirations 2017, Aspirations 2018

“The true sign of Intelligence is not Knowledge, but Imagination” – Albert Einstein​

As Sathya Nadella wrote in his brilliant Reflections post on LinkedIn – Source – it’s not just about the technology, but the people and passion behind the projects that truly make a difference.

Cognitive Intelligence

Without doubt, the most talked about technology last year, Artificial Intelligence has started main stream adoption across sectors. The world may be eaten up soon by cognitive services, machine learning APIs, Natural Language Processing and Digital Assistants enabled by Cloud based services from giants like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon and Alibaba.

Innovators across the world are creating amazing products using AI capabilities, like data driven farming to increase farm productivity FarmBeats, or the use of social AI chatbot to help handloom weavers create new design patterns Ruuh.

The era of digital assistants has begun. Like mobile phones, they provide a whole new interface to help make our lives easier – either through home automation or support with routine tasks. Many customer facing processes like guests services in hotels, restaurants, and retail industry are set to be disrupted.

Enterprise Automation 

Intelligence and Assistants are not just for the consumers. The one person most impacted by long screen time and burnout is the knowledge worker. Companies are turning to Intelligent Automation technologies to provide employees and customers a digital experience in work life. Cloud and Digital Automation technologies adoption have already become mainstream in 2017. The intent for most companies is not to replace jobs but to eliminate manual task ‘waste’ and get more work done with better productivity and efficiency.

A study by Forrester, for ServiceNow – a company that provides Cloud based intelligent business automation platform, collates data from Enterprises that have adopted ServiceNow for automating tasks for Customer Service, HR and other businesses. The results are outstanding – 20% increase in productivity, 2/3 reduction in time to develop new digital apps for business, intelligent agents providing 10 points increase in customer satisfaction score – these are just some of the benefits companies have started to gain ( https://www.servicenow.com/lpayr/analyst-reports/forrester-tei.html)

Looking Forward

2018 looks even more promising. The focus on automation and artificial intelligence is going to pick up mainstream across sectors and business functions. Cloud providers are ready with amazing tools and platforms, startups and SI partners are building new industry focussed solutions on these platforms as we speak, and top executives at most enterprises and governments are gearing up programs to adopt the technologies.

It’s all up to our imagination now!

May we all have a blessed 2018, Happy New Year!