Since the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has upended the traditional workplace, affecting nearly every industry. The tech sector, which has been ahead of the curve in terms of flexible work policy, has been on the roller coaster as well but has remained remarkably resilient. Deloitte's 14th annual Tech Trends report, released on Wednesday, takes a look at the current state of enterprises when it comes to IT. The Deloitte report focuses on the experience of global organizations, across industries, in order to ascertain what tech trends are on the horizon. Deloitte employs a "wide-angle lens" to predict what's happening, according to Mike Bechtel, chief futurist and managing director at Deloitte.

Did you miss a session from MetaBeat 2022? Head over to the on-demand library for all of our featured sessions here. Deloitte released the fifth edition of its State of AI in the Enterprise research report today, which surveyed more than 2,600 global executives on how businesses and industries are deploying and scaling artificial intelligence (AI) projects. Most notably, the Deloitte report found that while AI continues to move tantalizingly closer to the core of the enterprise – 94% of business leaders agree that AI is critical to success over the next five years – for some, outcomes seem to be lagging. For example, 79% percent of respondents reported achieving full-scale deployment for three or more types of AI applications, which is up from 62% last year.

Among the major trends in technology is the rapid development of artificial intelligence and its wide range of applications. In addition to enhancing technological applications, artificial intelligence allows us to simulate and expand human intelligence. As a technology, artificial intelligence has emerged as a critical component of complementing the efforts of human information security teams. Humans cannot adequately protect the dynamic attack surface of an organisation alone. This is why artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly critical to cybersecurity professionals in order to reduce breach risk and improve security posture.

Deloitte today released the fourth edition of its State of AI in the Enterprise report, which surveyed 2,857 business decision-makers between March and May 2021 about their perception of AI technologies. Few organizations claim to be completely AI-powered, the responses show, but a significant percentage are beginning to adopt practices that could get them there. In the survey, Deloitte explored the transformations happening inside firms applying AI and machine learning to drive value. During the pandemic, digitization efforts prompted many companies to adopt AI-powered solutions to back-office and customer-facing challenges. A PricewaterhouseCoopers whitepaper found that 52% percent of companies have accelerated their AI adoption plans, with global spending on AI systems set to jump from $85.3 billion in 2021 to over $204 billion in 2025, according to IDC.

Despite the fact that AI has been a hot issue for at least a decade, there are still barriers to its adoption by organisations. According to a Deloitte report, 40% of businesses believe AI technology and skills are too costly. No-code AI refers to a subgroup of artificial intelligence that aims to make AI more approachable to the general consumers. To implement AI and machine learning algorithms, no-code AI implies employing a no-code development platform with a graphical, code-free, and typically drag-and-drop interface. With no-coding AI, non-technical individuals can quickly categorise, assess, and create accurate models to make projections.

Despite the fact that AI has been a hot issue for at least a decade, there are still barriers to its adoption by organisations. According to a Deloitte report, 40% of businesses believe AI technology and skills are too costly. No-code AI refers to a subgroup of artificial intelligence that aims to make AI more approachable to the general consumers. To implement AI and machine learning algorithms, no-code AI implies employing a no-code development platform with a graphical, code-free, and typically drag-and-drop interface. With no-coding AI, non-technical individuals can quickly categorise, assess, and create accurate models to make projections.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought digital technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the center stage in all industries. The trend is also observed in healthcare industries as reported by a report released by Deloitte in late October. The report, Deloitte's 2020 State of AI, explores the adoption and management of AI technologies in health organisations, as well as the benefits that have been reaped by them. The survey for the report was conducted in late 2019, just before COVID-19 took the world by storm. "The pandemic opened the aperture for digital technologies such as AI to solve problems and highlighted the importance of AI," the report states.

Innovative companies are continuing to find new ways to benefit from artificial intelligence (AI). These include using AI to reinvent departments like marketing and customer service with predictive analytics--as well as to transform entire industries with breakthrough advances in automation and robotics, including healthcare, retail, and manufacturing. Below we unpack a recent Deloitte Digital report that looks at the benefits of conversational AI, including how the technology is changing the way companies engage with both customers and employees. According to Deloitte, conversational AI enables "a programmatic and intelligent way of offering a conversational experience to mimic conversations with real people, through digital and telecommunication technologies." These technologies include natural language processing, dynamic text-to-speech, and machine learning.

Data-driven experiences are rich, immersive and immediate. Think pizza delivery by drone, video cameras that can record traffic accidents at an intersection, freight trucks that can identify a potential system failure. These kinds of fast-acting activities need lots of data -- quickly. So they can't sustain latency as data travels to and from the cloud. That to-and-fro takes too long.

Agencies should look to early artificial intelligence adopters in government and industry when crafting strategies for adopting such technologies, according to a new report. Deloitte surveyed about 1,100 executives from U.S. organizations using AI in the third quarter of 2018 -- 10% of them from the public sector -- and found 74% of respondents felt the technologies would be "very" or "critically" important within two years. But government is lagging behind its peers in adopting the new technologies, according to the study. Bill Eggers, executive director of Deloitte's Center for Government Insights, said this reflects agencies' investment and strategizing around AI. "Governments were on the lower end of the AI maturity curve compared to other industries, and it's certainly no surprise that financial services and technology companies were the higher end," Eggers told FedScoop. "The reason why this might be is both a skills gap issue, but also the public sector is investing the least in AI of all the different industries that we looked at."