Crunching data in 2020
Welcome to 2020, I hope you had a nice start to the year.
So, what will this new decade bring? Let’s start by taking a quick look at data analytics:
We are seeing the consolidation of analytics tools across the industry, Salesforce has acquired Tableau and Microsoft have had great success with Power BI. Most major Tech companies know the future is data and the real time processing of it.
Regardless of the industry, all company leaders and decision makers must focus on analytics and digital transformation in 2020. There is so much valuable customer data to be processed and turned into insights. For any company to ensure it is competitive in 2020 and beyond they must make use of analytics tools.
As we saw with Salesforces’ acquisition of Tableau, other big players (SAS, Tibco, Splunk etc.) will get involved in similar acquisitions pretty soon.
If we invest in analytics we must also look at machine learning and artificial intelligence. The huge quantity of data collected is impossible to navigate and analyse without these tools.
The value of AI and machine learning to analytics is three fold. Fast, scalable and easy to use. Speed and scale take advantage of automating the analysis of large data sets as opposed to hiring data analysts. Thanks to AI and machine learning, complex data sets can now be analysed far more rapidly year upon year.
The increase in compute power only contributes slightly to this vast improvement in data analysis, it is mostly down to the maturity we are seeing in AI and ML algorithms along with the scalability in the cloud.
Unlike data analysis tools in the past, the addition of AI and machine learning to analytics tools has made them intuitive, easy to use, and much more reliable.
As good as they are in 2019, their speed and accuracy is expected to improve considerably in 2020.
I’ll now go ahead and make a prediction against one of the predicted advancements in 2020. Quality AI interfaces for voice… Siri and Cortana are improving but not noticeably. Microsoft are doing well with their conversational AI project but, as we all know, trying to dictate on this stuff is so far wrong that it takes more time to correct it all than type it out in the first place. There are improvements in following complex conversations and even emotions, we are also seeing vast improvements in the hardware side for smart devices helping to isolate voices in noisy conditions… but… Still too far off to properly predict 2020 will be the year for intuitive conversational AI based tech….
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