It should be clear by now that automation and artificial intelligence are about to hit the enterprise in a big way. But while this transformation will be rapid, it will not happen across the entire IT stack all at once. So where will this new computing paradigm first make its presence known in the enterprise? According to leading researchers, the most obvious candidates are the productivity applications like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Customer Relations Management (CRM) that have already subsumed much of the IT operational model, and this will effectively create a data environment that will, for the most part, manage itself in response to changing workload requirements. Gartner's David Cearley, for example, notes that artificial intelligence and machine learning have already shown a marked propensity to understand, learn, predict and adapt to a wide range of events, to the point that they can function autonomously even in complex environments.