The top AI and automation trends to expect in 2018

For years, artificial intelligence and process automation have evolved largely on independent paths. The coming year will bring steady innovation in both fields, but the real leap forward will be the synergy created when AI and intelligent process automation are harnessed together. To explain what I mean, I'll start by spending a few minutes on each area individually. In AI and machine learning, high-value targets like speech recognition and synthesis, image recognition and bots were identified years ago, but have seemed to remain just out of reach. Now these capabilities are becoming widely appreciated due to advances in three critical areas: massive compute power, robust deep-learning algorithms, and the availability of huge volumes of data to train models.