AI will be pervasive by 2020, predicts Gartner

AI will help create 2.3 million jobs while eliminating 1.8 million jobs in 2020, although new types of skills will be needed "AI promises to be the most disruptive class of technologies during the next 10 years due to advances in computational power, volume, velocity and variety of data, as well as advances in deep neural networks (DNNs)," says John-David Lovelock, research vice president at Gartner. Thus, AI technologies are prompting technology strategic planners to redraw near-term and long-term product plans, says Lovelock. By 2020, he states, at least 40 per cent of people will interact primarily with people-literate technologies, removing much of the perceived need to invest further in improving computer literacy. Virtual private assistants (VPAs) and voice response systems, such as Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant and Siri, are becoming the norm for consumer interaction with search engines, along with many other services that would previously need interaction via web browsers, he says. "For many users, this AI functionality will become the norm, and there will no longer be the need to understand, or use, traditional computer operating systems or applications for many tasks," notes Lovelock.