A.I. Adoption in 2022 in the Business World

A.I., No code platforms and RPA are just some of the approaches to rising automation.

This is an Op-Ed about where A.I. is today and where it can be tomorrow.

I think we can expect adoption of A.I to increase in the business world in 2022 and in the 2020s more broadly speaking. This is also due to the Great Resignation and how talent and inflation are driving bottlenecks in hiring.

With regards to machine learning and programming, it’s important to point out that NC/LC platforms and RPA are also forming a powerful automation scenario where digital transformation is not just about efficiency, but doing more with less staff.

So when it comes to digital transformation, the Covid crisis has provided important lessons for business leaders. Among the most compelling lessons is the potential data analytics and artificial intelligence brings to the table. But it’s not just that either.

While AI still has a long way to go before anything like human-level intelligence is achieved, it hasn't stopped the likes of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Nvidia, ByteDance and Amazon investing billions of dollars. This creates a scenario where it’s very difficult to compete with these companies.

Corporate Supremacy is the A.I. Advantage

So A.I. is also creating a bias in terms of how a winner-takes-all Capitalism is emerging in corporate leveraging of machine learning broadly speaking. While AI can excel at specific narrow tasks such as playing chess or summarizing an article, it still struggles to do more than one thing well.

Machines are getting smarter and smarter every year and research makes A.I. sound good on paper for Cloud customers who want to have an edge, A.I. still isn’t able to boost productivity holistically or understand the context of what is it doing.

Still, A.I. is improving how digital transformation is taking place. For instance, the crisis accelerated the adoption of analytics and AI, and this momentum will continue into the 2020s, surveys show. Fifty-two percent of companies accelerated their AI adoption plans because of the Covid crisis, a study by PwC finds.

Digital Transformation means Augmentation with A.I.

To meet evolving customer needs and accelerate digital transformation, more industries will start leveraging AI in the coming months. Meanwhile Cloud leaders like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud are getting better at offering AI-as-a-Service to their customers snowballing how A.I. will impact their industries. Still for most tasks and in most domains, a seven-year-old has far broader intelligence than any of today’s AI systems (even in 2022).

The era of dumb machine intelligence for the most part continues. Algorithms are good at approaching individual tasks, or tasks that include a small degree of variability.

AI researchers have started to show that there are ways to efficiently adapt AI training methods to changing environments or tasks, resulting in more robust agents, but its real potential is still a long ways off.

The Singularity may be more like a Great Convergence

The challenge for Artificial Intelligence to grow up is about context. Machine intelligence must find a good way of combining all the world’s immense knowledge of science and technology into the ‘magic sauce’ that can help us manifest the immense potential of the future, technologies such as distributed ledgers, Big Data, self-optimizing platforms, quantum computing, robotics, 3D-printing, robotic process automation and many other tools that are only truly useful in a convergence with each other.

Language Models will Bring real-world value

NLP and Language Models perhaps have the most potential to mature in 2022. GPT-4 is coming and AI systems that can generate convincing text, converse with humans, respond to questions, and more — are also set to improve in 2022 and indeed the 2020s in a tangible way that can help people in business but also to lead better and more fulfilling lives.

As Big Tech looks poised to race toward larger and larger language models next year, A.I. being our companion in many of life’s transitions and situations is more likely. A.I. in the 2020s will arrive at a HER operating system.

A.I. in Cloud Native Architectures

Adoption of A.I. however in business is becoming more mainstream as cloud-native architectures become the new normal. 86%, say that AI is becoming a “mainstream technology” at their company in 2021.

In the wake of the pandemic, the Great Resignation and various challenges in 2022, close to three-quarters of business leaders (72%) feel positive about the role that AI will play in the future, a survey by The AI Journal finds.

If you want to support me writing about A.I. you can do so here. I cannot continue to write without community support from my readers to build an effective community and future audience.

The truth is even in 2022 it’s hard to know the upper limit of A.I.’s ability to impact the business world. It’s that great unknown which makes the hype around machine intelligence also so seductive.

The hype around A.I. is as elusive as things like the Metaverse or blockchain and should in many ways continue to remain so. Yet A.I. has the advantage of receiving much more funding simultaneously as its potential is slowly unlocked in the Cloud and in new ways each year.