Leading research and advisory company Gartner has now predicted that enterprise-based A.I. will be valued at $1.2 trillion in 2018 and hit $3.9 trillion during 2022. The massive jump is said to be fueled by the overwhelmingly positive benefits A.I. can bring to not only businesses but to customers as well. According to Gartner, the technology will by far be the most “disruptive class of technologies” over the course of at least the next decade. The news is hardly surprising, given the benefits artificial intelligence is already delivering to the average user. However, the changes will be particularly pronounced in the enterprise market. Meanwhile, by percentage, the largest leaps in that progression are expected to happen from 2018 to 2019, growing by 70-percent and 62-percent respectively. The increases steadily decline from that point forward, dropping to 39-percent, 26-percent, and 17-percent for the following three years.
Gartner goes on to provide three key reasons why it has set its expectations so high, starting with one of the least obvious. Customer experience has both negative and positive connotations for A.I. in an enterprise since it can be viewed as harmful, in terms of loss of jobs. However, a focus on customer satisfaction can also be met with A.I. and will help spread the technology into new markets, effectively enabling growth of value and opening new uses. On the other hand, it will almost certainly increase the sale of both products and services alongside the generation of new ones. No specifics have been provided for how Gartner thinks the former of those two things but A.I. can be used as a customer convenience to spur more interaction between customer and company. Meanwhile, the use of A.I. in terms of both replacing and augmenting positions in a workplace will undoubtedly reduce both production and delivery costs.
It bears mention that Gartner could very well be wrong with its future predictions. However, it would make a degree of sense that business executives and other prominent figures in various industries will be the driving force behind the spread of A.I. technologies. Companies across the globe, have already begun incorporating A.I. into their own projects and business. For example, Google has made use of DeepMind’s A.I. to reduce cooling requirements and costs for its data centers. Conversely, homebuilders have begun incorporating A.I. into new construction in order to benefit buyers. So there’s at least a reasonable chance that Gartner’s projections here are right on the money.