Businesses' growing desire for more and more public cloud services is showing no signs of slowing down, according to the latest figures from Gartner. "Cloud is the powerhouse that drives today's digital organizations," said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner. The analyst house predicts businesses will continue to break up larger, monolithic applications into composable parts for DevOps processes. "Cloud native capabilities such as containerisation, database platform-as-a-service (dbPaaS) and AI/machine learning contain richer features than commoditised compute such as IaaS or network-as-a-service," said Gartner's Nag. The news comes after Gartner predicted earlier this month that global IT spending is set to reach a total of $4.4tn this year despite rising inflation, geopolitical disruption and ongoing talent shortages.

Engineering trust, accelerating growth and sculpting change are the three predominant trends Gartner has selected for its Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, 2021. They will drive organizations to explore emerging technologies such as nonfungible tokens (NFT), sovereign cloud, data fabric, generative AI and composable networks to help secure competitive advantage, the research firm said. Gartner's hype cycle provides a high-level view of important emerging trends that organizations must track, along with the specific technologies that must be monitored through the themes of trust, growth and change, said Philip Dawson, research vice president at Gartner. Engineering Trust: Trust demands security and reliability, Gartner said. However, it can also extend to building innovations as a resilient core and foundation for IT to deliver business value.

Meaningful artificial intelligence (AI) deployments are just beginning to take place, according to Gartner, Inc. Gartner's 2018 CIO Agenda Survey shows that four percent of CIOs have implemented AI, while a further 46 percent have developed plans to do so. "Despite huge levels of interest in AI technologies, current implementations remain at quite low levels," said Whit Andrews, research vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "However, there is potential for strong growth as CIOs begin piloting AI programs through a combination of buy, build and outsource efforts." As with most emerging or unfamiliar technologies, early adopters are facing many obstacles to the progress of AI in their organizations. Gartner analysts have identified the following four lessons that have emerged from these early AI projects.

ORLANDO – The pace of technology change is accelerating rapidly, augmented by factors that IT pros need to study-up on, things they never had to deal with before like hyperautomation, multiexperience, and human augmentation that Gartner says will have a significant impact on enterprises. "It's been 50 years since the first message was sent across what became the internet. In 50 years we've seen technology transform our enterprises, our relationships, and society itself," said Val Sribar, senior research vice president at Gartner. "The next five years may bring as much change as those last 50." Looking ahead just on year, Gartner created the "Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020," which the consulting firm released at its IT Symposium/XPO 2019 here this week.

AI projects are on the rise and will double within the next year according to a recent Gartner survey -- improved customer experience and task automation are key drivers of this growth. Currently, organisations working with AI or machine learning have, on average, four AI projects in place. And, of all respondents, 59% said that they have already AI deployed today. "We see a substantial acceleration in AI adoption this year," said Jim Hare, research vice president at Gartner. "The rising number of AI projects means that organisations may need to reorganise internally to make sure that AI projects are properly staffed and funded. It is a best practice to establish an AI Centre of Excellence to distribute skills, obtain funding, set priorities and share best practices in the best possible way."

In a short span of time, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI ML) have become the central marketable assets for SaaS and Cloud businesses. "Technology Maturity" of the organizations which are already offering and leveraging AI ML and data infrastructure in the Cloud range from start-ups, to innovators and pioneers, to leaders and trend-setters. The worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 17.5 percent in 2019 to total $214.3 billion, up from $182.4 billion in 2018, according to Gartner, Inc. Forrester predicts the Public Cloud market to reach $411 billion by 2022. "Fewer, but larger, Public Cloud platform providers and a maturing SaaS ecosystem will dominate Enterprise Cloud spending. CIOs should use this forecast to benchmark the pace and shape of their public Cloud strategies."

Artificial intelligence adoption, which has happened in fits and bursts till now, is all set to accelerate this year. That is if recent predictions of leading technology research firms like Gartner, IDC and Forrester for 2019 and beyond prove to be true. Almost every technology research company seems to agree that AI is on the horizon, across industries and geographies. IDC, for one, has predicted huge investments in AI-driven user interfaces and AI algorithms at endpoint devices on cloud-enabled networks. Gartner has forecast exponential increase in AI-enhanced virtual healthcare and sophisticated AI-facial recognition technology and Forrester expects firms to lay the foundation to meet AI's promise this year.

After all, whether it's self-driving cars or robots who talk to each other, we've all been hearing about how AI and machine learning are on an upward trend and are leading to advancement after advancement. For example, would-be eaters are making use of digital assistants like Siri and voice search to find places to eat nearby, consumers are using visual search to find exactly what they want at the tap of a button, and marketers are using probability and statistics in data science to tailor their strategies. As we close 2018 and near 2019, it's time to do what all marketers should do at the end of every year: analyze stats and trends to get an idea of what's to come. Seeing as how big AI is right now, up today are artificial intelligence stats for 2019, a couple of accompanying images and an artificial intelligence growth chart or two so you can visualize what you read. According to a PwC study of 2,500 U.S. consumers and business decision makers, business leaders, believe AI is going to be fundamental in the future.

It's no surprise that artificial intelligence is catching on this year, but fully half of all CIOs now have plans to implement AI technologies in their organizations according to Gartner Inc. Gartner is hosting its annual Data and Analytics Summit in Grapevine, Texas this week, which has attracted over 3,000 IT and data executives and professionals to learn more about the potential and opportunities with AI. A recent study by Garner, the 2018 CIO Agenda Survey, found that while "meaningful artificial intelligence (AI) deployments are just beginning to take place … four percent of CIOs have implemented AI." But another 46 percent have developed plans to do so. Artificial intelligence, which is an umbrella term referring to nearly a dozen different technologies such as machine learning, deep learning or robotic process automation, seems to be top buzzword in IT this year, but there is a great deal of hype around the topic, according to Gartner. "Despite huge levels of interest in AI technologies, current implementations remain at quite low levels," said Whit Andrews, research vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "However, there is potential for strong growth as CIOs begin piloting AI programs through a combination of buy, build and outsource efforts."

The uptake of artificial intelligence in business has been sluggish. However nearly half of the CIOs surveyed by Gartner said they have plans to implement the technology and those that already had shared some key AI lessons. "Despite huge levels of interest in AI technologies, current implementations remain at quite low levels," said Whit Andrews, research vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "However, there is potential for strong growth as CIOs begin piloting AI programs through a combination of buy, build and outsource efforts." Gartner outlined four lessons that have emerged from AI pioneers in their report, Lessons From Early AI Projects.