Big AI Trends for 2021
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Last year proved to be one of the most difficult periods of time for companies and governments all around the world due to COVID-19, and the challenges persist as we move further into 2021. Some industries were hit harder than others, like the industrial sector, where firms employ nearly 25 million people worldwide and generate $9.3 trillion in annual revenue.
These challenges impact the AI domain as well, especially as consumer behavior continues to change. While some may believe everything will return to normal in due time, many of these changes are likely here to stay, and companies will focus on them when developing their AI and data strategies in 2021.
According to Algorithmia’s ‘2021 Enterprise Trends in Machine Learning,’ the overarching theme this year is that organizations will place greater importance on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) initiatives. As of right now, the market is dominated by early adopters of the technology, while others, especially small- and medium-sized organizations, face challenges involving costs and deployment.
Small- and Medium-Size Companies Face Toughest Challenges
Half of all organizations rank governance as the top challenge for AI and ML deployment. One of the driving factors behind this is regulation, with 67% of organizations responding that they need to comply with multiple regulations, while only 8% responding they don't have a single one. Another one of the major challenges involving AI within a company is technology integration and compatibility. Some companies struggle with integrating AI and ML technologies due to their rapidly changing nature. More specifically, 49% of the survey’s respondents said this is one of the major challenges surrounding AI.
Despite these challenges, organizations across every level continue to increase their AI and ML budgets while bringing in new talent. According to one in four of the survey’s respondents, AI and ML initiatives should have been labeled a top priority sooner. This is now being reflected as 50% of the respondents plan to spend more on these initiatives in 2021, and 27% reported that their organizations had already increased AI and ML teams.
These numbers show that while COVID-19 has shaken the world up, it has not thrown us off our current path of digitalization and AI adoption. An increasing number of companies are adopting AI in at least one business function.
The sectors seeing the highest adoption rates include:
Product and Service Development
Service Operations
Marketing and Sales
Risk
Manufacturing
Human Resources
Supply-chain Management
It will be important for businesses to take a human-centered approach to AI adoption, as the technology can exacerbate already existing issues that worsened during COVID-19, such as office closures.
As the world went into lockdown, offices, factories and other workspaces sent their employees home. Many of these offices will return; many won’t. And even those that do return face an impending threat of closing once again as AI and automation hits more areas, which can increase disparity between white collar and labor jobs. This in turn will create more opportunities for changes in corporate processes.
The first step to creating a more equitable AI- and data-driven work environment is to identify some of the big trends, which allow leaders to prepare their organizations to take the necessary steps.
Some of the top AI trends for 2021 include:
Ethical/Explainable AI
Rise of Data Science
AI-powered Automation
Increased AI Budgets
Third-party ML Solutions
1. Ethical/Explainable AI
One of the major trends for AI in 2021 does not involve a specific technology, but rather involves the way we humans develop AI in general.
Prior to COVID-19, there was an increasing concern over issues surrounding AI’s deployment and implementation, specifically in regard to deepfakes, algorithmic bias, data privacy, facial recognition technology and issues with law enforcement use. The pandemic only managed to worsen these issues.
Here is a look at some of the more recent uses of AI that raised ethical concerns:
COVID-19: While AI could have drastically changed the response to COVID-19 if it had been embraced at the start, or even way before there was a single case of the virus, it was and still is necessary to apply data ethics. One of the major concerns was the collection, use and sharing of data extracted from many individuals within the society. This was especially apparent in China, where the technology was relied on for a major surveillance and contact tracing initiative.
U.S. Criminal Justice System: Even in a world without COVID-19, unethical uses of AI have been around as long as the technology itself. The United States began to implement AI solutions in law enforcement a few years back, and it did not take long for major ethical issues to arise.
Some of the uses include speeding up court processes due to a high prison population, facial recognition systems to identify suspects, and AI risk assessment tools, which are the most controversial of all. In 2016, an investigation carried out by ProPublica found that data fed to an AI system used by judges was biased against minorities.
Given all of these ethical concerns, companies and governments alike will be expected to provide more transparency as AI plays a bigger role. An increasing trend is ‘explainable’ AI, which takes place when AI developers and companies explain how the specific algorithms arrive at their predictions. By doing this, these organizations can provide transparency to the public.
2. Rise of Data Science
Another major trend among companies in 2021 will be the spreading out of data science skills throughout an organization. In other words, these skills will no longer be apparent only among data scientists, but rather every employee from top to bottom. As data science becomes one of the most highly demanded skills, AI and ML technologies will be increasingly relied on by all types of employees for better insights and decision-making processes.
As we move into a more data-driven world with companies relying on increasingly more data, they will begin implementing initiatives to teach employees how to analyze it. Data literacy, or the ability to read, utilize, analyze and communicate with data, will be a crucial skill for all employees of modern companies. With every employee being data literate, it will change how a company operates, allowing for much more accurate predictions and innovative approaches at every level of the organization.
3. AI-powered Automation
Another major AI trend of 2021 involves AI-powered automation. AI and automation go hand and hand, and that will become increasingly true as we move into 2021.
According to recent statistics, this could replace 30% of human labor by 2030 depending on the various approaches. The major difference expected to begin taking place in 2021 is AI-powered automation breaking away from traditional sectors and moving into many others.
AI-powered automation is used to address organizational and structural issues by either augmenting or fully automating decision-making processes. It can also be used for data-driven insights.
This trend is expected to impact more business functions than previously, and some of the major areas include:
Product Development and Creation
Task Elimination
Text Augmentation
Optimization
With an increase in automation, there is a high chance for the displacement of workers. Because of this, governments and organizations will likely implement upskilling and retraining initiatives in their organizations, which will begin a major transition of the workforce into AI-related skills. Companies like Amazon have already begun to set the standard in this regard with their ‘Upskilling 2025’ initiative.
4. Increased AI Budgets
With all of these other trends comes the need for increased AI budgets within the organizations, and this is a growing trend year-after-year. According to the survey, 76% of organizations prioritize AI and ML over other IT initiatives. Even more insightful is the fact that 64% of those respondents have increased AI and ML priority over the last 12 months, meaning a large portion of the companies are finally embracing the technology.
A deeper breakdown shows that 49% consider AI and ML a high priority, 28% a top priority, 20% a medium priority, and only 4% a low priority.
This is an especially notable trend given the turmoil organizations faced in 2020. Despite the various closures and major disruptions, which resulted in companies focusing on critical processes, AI and ML managed to remain and rise in priority. If organizations still prioritize these solutions during times like these, they will only increase as operations return to some level of normalcy.
5. Third-party ML Solutions
The last of the leading trends for 2021 covered here is the use of third-party ML solutions by companies rather than developing their own from start-to-finish. Organizations that do rely on third-party solutions save around 19-21% on infrastructure costs annually.
These organizations don't just save money, but they also save time as they don’t need to dedicate as much to model deployment. This frees up data scientists’ time to work in other areas of an organization rather than building an entire model. The other benefit of third-party solutions is that they allow models to go into production faster.
Third-party solutions are especially crucial for small- to medium-sized organizations, which often don't have the resources necessary to develop their own.
2021’s Impact on AI
The year 2021 will undoubtedly have major implications for the integration of AI technologies with both companies and governments. We are seeing many new factors begin playing a role, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the same ones we have been encountering for years now.
As the technology begins to impact everyday citizens’ lives, whether it be positively or negatively, at work or at home, there will be a loud call for explainable algorithms. At the same time, it is going to drastically change our notion of what a workspace looks like. There will be a move toward factories entirely powered by AI-automation, and data literacy will be expected from all types of employees in other organizations. All of this means 2021 will see nearly all areas of the globe, albeit at different paces, lean further into AI technologies.