6 trends that will drive artificial intelligence deployments in 2019

The shockingly fast sell-out of the 2018 Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference put industry on notice: artificial intelligence is poised to break out of the hype cycle and become an important element in strategic business planning. A lot has been written about AI over the last year, but as the many papers and presentations from NIPS showed, much of what has been offered for public consumption has been superficial and, in some cases, misleading. AI is neither a simple panacea poised to solve all our business problems, nor is it a looming evil ready to usher in a dystopian future. It is a powerful tool that can aid decision making in a fast-moving, digital business climate--and there's ample evidence that it's already happening. Among the lucky few who were able to secure credentials to the conference, and as machine learning practitioners who have spent the better part of their careers involved with AI and machine learning, we came away with a look into the future of AI.