This year's summer holidays provided me with a stark realisation: how much AI has become an integral part of everyday life. I spent a happy two weeks driving the south of Italy with my family. It was very enjoyable trip and provided a welcome rest. I cannot help but also reflect on the difference in the experience of driving abroad now and from before. Ten years ago, our holiday started in a car full of little people failing to follow the printed route map from the airport towards our Eurocamp site.

New forecasts from Transforma Insights point at an explosion in the use of Artificial Intelligence for improving enterprise processes and critical systems. The devil is, as ever, in the detail, but the headline is that adoption of AI, measured in'instances' is set to grow ten-fold in the next decade. At Transforma Insights we are currently in the process of pulling together a set of forecasts of the Artificial Intelligence market, and preparing for our webinar on the 16th February. In this blog post we have a peek at the first sets of data coming from the report. We have pulled out a couple of highlights of the research to give a flavour of the granularity of the data, the topics we'll be looking at in the webinar and the key emerging themes.

If you work in the operations, process improvement, or robotic process automation (RPA) spaces, chances are you've seen the phrase "intelligent automation" pop up many times. While this term seems like it encompasses a lot, the lack of clarity around it can render it meaningless. Is intelligent automation a rebranding of RPA? Is it RPA enhanced by AI? Or, is it simply a catch-all term for process automation software that aims to make technologies like business process management (BPM) sound new again? It starts with technologies we know and love, like BPM and RPA, and brings them together in a unified toolkit so that an enterprise's automation needs can be addressed by the most relevant tool.

When you look into the past, you realize that the vocabulary used to describe the intelligent usage of data has evolved a lot. Everything started in 2012, with the term Big Data. It was when the planet understood that our society was going to generate gigantic amounts of data, due to smartphone usage, cloud apps, IoT, etc. … and something useful could maybe be done with it. If you think about the essence of the name Big Data, it was about just collecting raw data, but not yet about processing it -- and even less about knowing exactly for what purpose to use it. There was an intuition that something was happening with data, but nothing was concrete and really mature at this time. Today Big Data is not used so much.

ABBYY, a global leader in Content IQ technologies and solutions, today announced it has signed an agreement to acquire Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-based TimelinePI. TimelinePI provides a comprehensive process intelligence platform designed to empower users to understand, monitor and optimize any business process. The global process analytics market size is expected to grow to USD 1,421.7 million by 2023 according to Research and Markets. The acquisition of TimelinePI is a strategic investment by ABBYY into the emerging process intelligence market which is critical to truly understanding the impact and effectiveness of business processes and opportunities for productivity gains from digital transformation investments. TimelinePI's vision of combining the most versatile process mining and operational monitoring with cutting-edge, process-centric AI and machine learning will serve as a critical cornerstone to ABBYY's Digital IQ strategy.

Artificial intelligence is on the minds of business leaders everywhere because they've either heard or believe that AI will change the way companies do business. What we're seeing now is just the beginning. For everyone's sake, more thought needs to be given to the workforce impact and how humans and machines will complement each other. Recently, professional services company Genpact and FORTUNE Knowledge Group surveyed 300 senior executives from companies in the North American, European and Asia-Pacific regions with annual revenues of $1 billion per year or more. According to the report, "AI leaders expect that the modern workforce will be comfortable working alongside robots by 2020."

Kevin Gavin (CMO at Five9): Next year the use of Artificial Intelligence will continue to rise and we'll see an increase in its potential to make our everyday lives easier. Machines will continue to learn patterns and provide answers to help eliminate some of our mundane tasks, and intelligent machine personas like the Alexa in Amazon Echo and Siri in Apple devices, are paving the way for natural language processing (NLP). However, in the customer service industry in particular, at the end of the day customers will still seek the human touch when getting complex issues and questions resolved because AI will never be able to replace the empathy that a real person can provide. Daniel Incandela (SVP Global Marketing at ReturnPath): The future of all enterprise processes will be driven by Artificial Intelligence, which requires the highest quality of data to be successful. AI is where all business processes are headed; however, with the recent push of AI technology advancements for businesses - many companies have not addressed how they will ensure that the data their AI models are built on is high quality.