Top 10 Analytics trends in 2018: Analytics India article
The Analytics India magazine published the top 10 trends expected to be seen in 2018, by talking to companies and people in the industry. I’ve linked to this report here, and this includes 2 of the trends that I had shared for this report.
Apart from the usual suspects around Artificial intelligence, IOT or video-pictures-text data, which are trends that have been maturing over the past 5 years, the relatively newer ones are around:
- Democratising machine learning through cloud-based platforms (Tensor flow, Azure ML and the like)
- Uncanny intelligence through Behavioral sciences in Analytics
- Robotic Process Automation and rise of the digitial workforce
- Conversational interfaces and Chatbots
And here are the 3 trends that I had shared for this article:
1. BOTs invade the enterprise: Organisations will double up on adoption of tools that will usher the next wave of enterprise automation. While robotic process automation (RPA) and the army of efficiency-based tools would eliminate tedious, effort-intensive tasks at one end, Artificial Intelligence and the class of machine learning techniques would take the sting out of complex, cognition-intensive tasks. Prepare to say hello to your digital colleagues!
2. Conversational interfaces could finally bring about the tipping point in wide-spread adoption of analytics. Having a natural conversation and getting answers to not just weather & traffic updates, but also financial operational metrics or deeper ‘why’ and ‘what if’ questions can transform not just businesses, but the consumer space. While this might take a couple of years to mature, we’ll see some firm, early steps & initial success stories in 2018.
3. Insights-as-a-service: Analytics will increasingly get unbundled with a variety of services available for every task in the analyticspipeline through libraries on the cloud or APIs, increasingly for free. The focus will shift to stringing together these services, often across tools, to deliver insights in a lightweight model. This will signal a shift away from expensive monolithic tools or custom, grounds-up development.
Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Fabulous 2018!
