Check out the Strata Data and Artificial Intelligence conference series, which cover the topics and key issues discussed in this post. Here are key AI trends business leaders and practitioners should watch in the months ahead. While full automation might still be a ways off, there are many workflows and tasks that lend themselves to partial automation. In fact, McKinsey estimates that "fewer than 5% of occupations can be entirely automated using current technology. However, about 60% of occupations could have 30% or more of their constituent activities automated."

Here are key AI trends business leaders and practitioners should watch in the months ahead. While full automation might still be a ways off, there are many workflows and tasks that lend themselves to partial automation. In fact, McKinsey estimates that "fewer than 5% of occupations can be entirely automated using current technology. However, about 60% of occupations could have 30% or more of their constituent activities automated." We have already seen some interesting products and services that rely on computer vision and speech technologies, and we expect to see even more in 2019.

Data science became the highest-paid IT profession in 2018, and the field is set for further growth in 2019 as the tools and techniques become more accessible and AI moves from hype to practical use cases. A recent Deloitte survey estimated 57 percent of businesses are increasing spending in AI as organisations start to wake up to the potential business benefits. "We are just at the beginning of the enterprise machine learning transformation. In 2019, we'll see a new step in maturity, as companies advance from PoCs to production capabilities," says Stephen Line, VP of EMEA at Cloudera. "Enterprise machine learning adoption will continue as businesses look to automate pattern detection, prediction and decision making to drive transformational efficiency improvement, competitive differentiation and growth. As early adopters advance from proof-of-concepts to production deployment of multiple use-cases, we'll continue to see an emergence of technologies and best practices aimed at helping operationalise, scale and ultimately industrialise these capabilities to achieve full transformational value," he predicts.

Open your Facebook feed, a newspaper or turn on the news and you'll likely see something about the dangers of machine learning, the increasing amount of fake news or even the dangers of AI on our privacy. Yet, these technologies are continuing to develop and thanks to new developments in automation and machine deception – they will continue to shape the use of AI over the coming year. While full automation might still be a way off, there are many workflows and tasks that lend themselves to partial automation. In fact, McKinsey estimates that "fewer than 5 per cent of occupations can be entirely automated using current technology. However, about 60 per cent of occupations could have 30 per cent or more of their constituent activities automated."