'Machine learning is the big one': Deloitte expert looks to the future of tech trends

The dominant tech trend in places like Southeast Asia will not be artificial intelligence as a whole, but rather it will be the more specific AI field of machine learning, according to a researcher from Deloitte. "Machine learning is the big one, not AI. AI's a very broad field, we are talking about the very narrow field of machine learning," Duncan Stewart, the director of technology, media, and telecommunications research at Deloitte Canada, told CNBC. Deloitte predicts that the next 12 months will see significant progress in augmented reality, mobile device usage, and increasingly sophisticated chips. But the most dominant trend will be machine learning -- when programs predict or explain using large amounts of data without being explicitly programmed -- according to Stewart.