Modernized supply chains, resilience and accessibility -- AI predictions for 2023

It's the time of year when people start to look ahead to the next one and offer predictions for what might lie ahead. For the past couple of years this has rather been hijacked by events including COVID, the Ukraine conflict and consequent economic disruption.

This hasn't stopped people in the tech world making predictions though, in fact we've received more this year than ever. So in the first of a series of roundups let's take a look at what might lie ahead for AI in 2023.

AI adoption is set to accelerate in order to improve supply chains, thinks John Vicente, CTO at Divert, "Over the last decade, we've seen food retailers make deeper investments in technologies, like artificial intelligence and Internet of Things solutions, to source better data across the food supply chain, including insights around wasted food. These technologies haven't been fully taken advantage of, but I expect that to change in 2023. Now that the initial adoption has taken place, I expect AI and IoT technologies will have greater penetration and adoption in the market."

This is echoed by Kevin Price, VP portfolio strategy and enablement for EAM and technical product evangelist at Hexagon Asset Lifecycle Intelligence. "Increased capabilities in AI and machine learning, automation and smart digital reality will drive a previously undiscoverable return on investment. In 2023, Industry 4.0 will present a chance to reach new levels of efficiency, productivity and optimization, and all at a cost that is focused on the returns versus sunken costs into the technology itself. We've seen already that EAM (Enterprise Asset Management) technologies can give back 45 minutes per technician per shift, and recordings are more accurate through the value of an electronic mind. As we advance, these hidden opportunities will continue to come to light."

Florian Hübner, CEO and founder at Uberall, thinks AI will aid customer engagement. "Social media and technologies such as AI or, more recently, the metaverse, offer creative marketers new playgrounds to come closer to their customers online and offline. For example, the US restaurant chain Chipotle gives its fans the opportunity to roll their own digital burritos on the online gaming platform Roblox and earn a real snack in one of its stores. In the next year and beyond, these environments will become an even stronger focus for the industry to become part of a long-term transformation of digital marketing strategies and take the hybrid customer experience to a new level."

Enterprises will embrace AI to gain resiliency among economic uncertainty believes Akhilesh Tripathi, CEO of Digitate:

During economic uncertainty, enterprises want improved business uptime, productivity gains and revenue assurance. To gain an advantage, they will have to build an autonomous enterprise that is built on the pillars of AI, ML and intelligent automation. This will help with business scaling and resiliency and creating competitive differentiation needed during uncertain times.

The importance of being able to demonstrate business value that during economic downtime will be key. Gartner, at a recent keynote in London, stated that just 17 percent of organizations are consistently able to demonstrate the business value of IT. That percentage has to get better moving into the new year. In 2023, organizations will increasingly use automation to maximize productivity. Expect greater adoption of AI to make IT systems more resilient without growing costs. Using AI, businesses can automate some of the most essential and elemental IT operations tasks, such as monitoring alerts managing employee onboarding and offboarding. In doing so, companies not only make their IT systems stronger, they also free up skilled IT staff to focus on higher value projects. Expect greater adoption of cloud and multi-cloud operations. Sustainability metrics are also a major focus, so AI has a role to play there in supporting organizational efforts to meet their goals.

Brian Jenkins, VP at Librestream, thinks AI has a role to play in addressing talent shortages. "We are seeing AI-based implementations gain traction in industrial market segments such as energy, aerospace and defense, and manufacturing. We will see this trend grow further in 2023 as businesses leverage this technology to assist with on-the-job workforce training and access to institutional knowledge. In the current workforce climate (with higher retirements and lower tenures), AI-supported technologies (like NLP and computer vision), in tandem with other technologies such as augmented reality (AR), will have much more relevant importance with field workforces. Going beyond the in-office digital transformation, AI provides a unique benefit when capturing and redistributing relevant content and resources to workers in the field. From work instructions to historical data about maintenance of equipment, workers will augment their capabilities easily. Organizations will see the need for AI and its benefits on overall process costs and retention/acquisition of talent."

Ion Stoica, the co-founder of Anyscale and Databricks, thinks that AI scaling will become a necessity. "There is a growing gap between the demands of machine learning applications and the limitations of a single processor or a single server. In the past few years alone, the computational requirements for ML training have been growing more than 10 times every 18 months. This fact, combined with the engineering complexity of scaling these workloads, has led to over 85 percent of AI projects failing in production."

Ali Chaudhry, advisory board member at Oxylabs, thinks AI apps will start to replace Google. "I see ChatGPT replacing Google in many ways and OpenAI emerging as a big tech giant on top of this product. It will be interesting to explore its impact on education, healthcare, and personalized software. It will transform our society in many ways."

AI will aid natural language processing thinks Antti Nivala, CEO and co-founder of M-Files, "In 2023, AI-based solutions will better understand industry-specific domain language -- or context-specific user behavior -- as advances in natural language processing and the capacity to understand user intent make their way into business applications. This will significantly enhance how knowledge workers search for information and allow information management systems to better deliver relevant information to end users, even before they begin looking."

Kris Beevers, CEO of NS1, says we'll see greater personalization. "In the near future, AI and machine learning models will become hyper-personalized. Each model will be optimized for a specific person, location, or application, accounting for their particular needs and idiosyncrasies. Creating these models will require processing and deploying massive data sets, on a far greater scale than a central data lake could hope to handle. As a result, expect to see edge infrastructure become critical as a way to make the creation and storage of these models more sustainable at scale."

While Keshav Pingali, co-founder and CEO of Katana Graph, believes AI will become more accessible across organizations and functions. "The recent spike in popularity in ChatGPT has been heralded as a major breakthrough in delivering safe and useful AI systems that non-technical users can access in a conversational way. In 2023, we can expect more models to be unveiled, as data between the user and the AI assistant will find ways to improve how departments -- from marketing, sales, HR and others -- will work."

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