Anyone with any doubts about the interest in AI and its use across enterprise technologies only needs to look at the example of the Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) market and the kind of verticals that are investing in it to quash those doubts. According to the Everest Group's recently published report, Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) State of the Market Report 2021 (purchase required) the market for this segment alone is estimated at $700-750 million in 2020 and expected to grow at a rate of 55-65% over the next year. Cost impact is now the key driver for intelligent document processing adoption, closely followed by improving operational efficiency and productivity. These solutions blend AI technologies to efficiently process all types of documents and feed the output into downstream applications. Optical character recognition (OCR), computer vision, machine learning (ML) and deep learning models, and natural language processing (NLP) are the key core technologies powering IDP capabilities.

A common definition is it's the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think as humans do and impersonate their actions. AI can refer to any system that exhibits traits associated with the human mind, such as the ability to learn and solve problems. Technology products and services bolstered with AI capabilities can lead to significant benefits for organizations: increased efficiency, automation of manual processes, enhanced decision making, improved customer service and experience, and the ability to solve complex problems--to name a few. However, IT and business leaders need to be adept at separating the hype from the reality. As research firm Gartner notes, many organizations struggle to put a realistic value on AI. Business leaders tend to overestimate the impact of the technology and underestimate its complexity, it says.

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and deployments are becoming even more widespread, thanks to a combination of growing amounts of data, faster processing power, and increasingly powerful algorithms. Indeed, as AI technologies make their way into virtually every industry, enabling machines to speak, listen, move, and make decisions in unprecedented ways, a wide range of use cases are illustrating the potential business opportunities, attracting new investment, and driving changes to existing business processes. According to a new report from Tractica, AI implementations now encompass 258 discrete use cases, and the worldwide market for AI software stands at $8.1 billion as of the end of 2018, a figure the market intelligence firm forecasts to rise to $105.8 billion annually by 2025. "The AI opportunity spans a wide range of industries and geographies, from advertising and automotive, to transportation and telecommunications," says principal analyst Keith Kirkpatrick. "A significant portion of the overall revenue is concentrated in highly domain-specific markets with high-volume data needs and ontologies, as well as those with growing applications for machine perception."