How AI Fares in Gartner's Latest Hype Cycle

It's late summer, which means three things: pennant races heat up in baseball, kids go back to school, and Gartner releases its annual Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies. Gartner identified AI Everywhere as one of three "megatrends" for the 2017 report (the others are transparently immersive experiences and digital platforms). The hype surrounding AI and related technologies has certainly perked up in 2017, as the IT and analytics industry appears to have picked up its considerable luggage related to big data analytics and deposited it firmly on the AI train. With AI now broadly carrying the torch for big data analytics, it's no surprise that we're seeing continued excitement around related technologies, particularly machine learning and deep learning. "AI technologies will be the most disruptive class of technologies over the next 10 years due to radical computational power, near-endless amounts of data and unprecedented advances in deep neural networks," says Mike J. Walker, research director for Gartner.