Trends to Watch in Artificial Intelligence for 2019

In 2018, we have seen a massive hype for artificial intelligence. In the coming years this hype will subside and we will see more stringent AI strategies being implemented within organizations. In recent years, we have seen some major breakthroughs of AI in various domains.

This trend will continue in the future causing breakthroughs in domains like healthcare especially in terms of precision medicines, surgery etc. ; privacy and security - with blockchain leading to decentralization; AI will empower smart cities leading to more efficient urban analytics and hence enhanced city life.

The XR industry, paired with AI, has the potential to make major breakthroughs especially in surgery, telemedicine, retail, finance and real estate. Although this will take some time, but in the coming years we will definitely see some advancements.

Some key trends
* Application of AI and XR will be much prevalent for industrial use cases benefitting industry verticals like healthcare, finance and education!

* IoT - the connected ecosystem will expand more with the implications of artificial intelligence embedded at the edge, deriving more insights with massively reduced latency.

* AI will cause a skill shift within the existing workforce.

* Virtual agent will experience a boom especially in service industries.

* Our daily driver - the smartphones are already implementing intelligence for photography, battery health optimization etc. Of course, all these are possible because of enhanced hardware and cutting-edge processors that has AI engine enabled or has the power to process AI related tasks. In the coming years this trend will continue to grow. We will see more enhanced processors and hence more developed consumer device supporting tasks that requires massive computation power like AR, VR etc.

All in all, in the immediate future we will see the AI trend to grow with its implementation in various verticals leading to some noteworthy innovations!

-- Sukanya Mandal, IEEE Member and Data Science Professional, India.