While many companies already recognize AI as a competitive advantage, this perception will only increase as the technology matures and organizations gain an even deeper understanding of its capabilities and full potential. To help you prepare for these impending changes, I've picked out four AI trends that I believe will affect organizations and consumers next year. Before cloud was mainstream, many companies sold installed software applications or bought hardware and claimed that they were the cloud. In reality, all they were doing was packaging their products in different ways. AI is going through a similar sort of ultra-hype cycle.

The market for worldwide artificial intelligence software will boom nearly 30-fold to $89.8 billion by 2015, up from $3.2 billion in 2016, says research firm Tractica. Tech giants Apple, Google-parent Alphabet, Facebook and Microsoft have forged ahead in applying AI software to speech recognition, internet search, and classifying images. "Artificial intelligence is already key to how consumer internet companies operate today, allowing them to roll out hyper-personalized services by following an'AI first' strategy," Tractica's research director, Aditya Kaul, said in a news release. "The rest of the market in the enterprise and government sectors is still catching up on adopting AI and has yet to fully understand its value." IBD'S TAKE: Read IBD's The Big Picture column each day to stay on top of the market direction, a key indicator that lets you know when you can be aggressive and when...