Digital transformation is so ingrained in our day-to-day activities at this point that we hardly notice its effects anymore. This doesn’t mean that developments will slow dow, howeve. There are more changes to come. To gain an insight into how digital transformation will progress over the next five years or so, Digital Journal spoke with Matt Mead, CTO of SPR (a digital transformation agency). Mead shares his predictions for ‘The Next Big Things’ in digital transformation and what businesses should get prepared for.
Digital Journal: How has digital transformation altered our lives up until now?
Matt Mead: Digital transformation’s largest contribution is to provide attention outside of IT to the importance and value of modernizing and digitizing business
DJ: Over the next five years, what can we expect from artificial intelligence?
Mead: Over the next five years, we can expect developers to incorporate AI into many apps that we use. Some new features they’ll create will use AI like face detection on a consumer-grade home video camera. They’ll also make existing features better or more effective by incorporating AI.
We’ll also see more sophisticated video analysis and detection through open-source and commercial computer vision libraries as developers integrate them into more apps. We’ll also be able to detect subtle differences more easily in video streams between detecting a person, a pet or even a package delivery.
DJ: What new insights can be gained from data processing?
Mead:Organizations can gain many insights from data processing, which is the reason for a surge in big data technology usage. For example, Using purchase information, an organization can use AI to predict when a customer will place their next order, as well as what they will order. Or using weather and prior claims information, an insurance company can predict future claims based on various weather situations. Finally, looking at known prior fraud situations, an organization could use that data to identify future fraud in real-time.
DJ: What can we expect from chatbots or voice technologies?
Mead:We can expect to see more people adoption chatbot technology that’s supported by major cloud platforms like AWS and Azure.
For voice chatbots, we can expect to have richer conversations that are more complex and require less memorized language to invoke behaviors. In these situations, the systems can assume context from the spoken command or question, or infer it from previous questions or commands by the user.
There will be more growth in text bots than voice bots in business, especially related to chatbots on websites to increase customer engagement
DJ: What developments will impact wearables?
Mead:We can expect data from wearables to be sent to the cloud for processing in real time with insights being presented on the wearable or accompanying app.
DJ: What else can we expect to see over the next five years?
Mead:The most interesting part of AI over next five years is related to machine learning and deep learning. We can expect data that is currently disconnected and stored in different, unlinked places to get connected and reveal behaviors and activities that will raise privacy concerns.
Considering that public cameras are becoming more common, imagine if data from public cameras were made open to the public and companies used AI to identify individuals in these videos. What if you were able to search on individuals and see videos of the person from all sorts of public settings? We can expect to see legislation and policies around privacy to protect people in these situations
