2017 and Beyond: How Digital Innovation Will Impact the World
Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to alter data infrastructure and processes in some very significant ways over the next decade, but some applications are riper for deployment than others.
While stories abound about talking data centers, self-managing ecosystems, and the wealth of knowledge to be gleaned from AI-powered analytics, the initial implementations will likely center on more practical needs, like managing the flow of data from connected devices and streamlining the interplay between hardware, software and various management systems.
According to eWeek’s Chris Preimesberger, AI is already a facet of key industry verticals, such as financial services, health care and telecommunications, all of which stand to benefit tremendously from faster, more accurate data processing. In many cases, the drive to implement AI is fueled by a lack of expertise in the knowledge workforce regarding advanced analytics, even though many workers have deep knowledge of their industries. With many vertical-specific tools hitting the channel, AI is considered the best way to leverage that knowledge to develop new products and new market opportunities.
Of course, many AI solutions are targeted at the rote, repetitive tasks that people tend to loathe, such as load balancing. Solutions like HAProxy Technologies’ enterprise-class load balancer and application delivery controller are benefiting from an infusion of AI, in this case ScentiaMobile’s WURFL InFuze platform, to help organizations manage the increasingly diverse traffic coming from both wired and wireless devices. The system can be applied to physical, virtual and containerized architectures, allowing device and traffic data to be amended to the HTTP headers on downstream applications for vastly improved accuracy in highly dynamic environments.
IT Service Management (ITSM) is also poised to see a rapid infusion of intelligence, says Enterprise Apps Today. Sunview Software recently added AI capabilities to its ChangeGear platform to foster real-time, predictive performance of IT services. The system is intended to improve user satisfaction and scale up response capabilities and trouble-ticket fulfillment, plus analyze user interaction data and usage patterns to enhance performance over time. Through intelligent technologies, the company says it can also extend self-service capabilities to a wider array of functions and support chatbots to automate the dissemination of data from a continually expanding knowledge base.
Indeed, the development of intelligent contact center solutions is likely to become one of the key ways in which organizations augment interactions between and among users, employees, partners and other stakeholders. Companies like Nobelbiz are turning AI loose on enterprise-level business intelligence (BI) platforms with the idea of turning the contact center into the hub of all communication activity throughout the enterprise. In this way, organizations can deploy and support a host of advanced applications, such as carrier-level call routing and database management to data aggregation and normalization across multiple contact sites and data centers.
AI is seen by many as the scary monster out to destroy IT jobs. But like previous forms of automation, it is far more likely to create more jobs than it destroys because it will expand the performance requirements of the data environment itself in ways that require higher levels of insight and intuition than mere algorithms can provide.
By taking on much of the tedium in basic level data and infrastructure management, AI not only provides for a more trouble-free data experience, it allows people to excel at what they do best: engage in creative problem-solving and develop high-value opportunities for themselves and the enterprise.
Arthur Cole writes about infrastructure for IT Business Edge. Cole has been covering the high-tech media and computing industries for more than 20 years, having served as editor of TV Technology, Video Technology News, Internet News and Multimedia Weekly. His contributions have appeared in Communications Today and Enterprise Networking Planet and as web content for numerous high-tech clients like TwinStrata and Carpathia. Follow Art on Twitter @acole602.
