6pegaAs you probably expected, artificial intelligence (AI) will again be one of the top IT topics in 2020 and the areas of empathy and improvement of the brand experience will continue to keep companies busy this year.

Pegasystems, a leading provider of software for digital transformation, gives some insights into what we should keep in mind this year:

1. In the past few years, many providers have referred to everything as AI that was remotely related to intelligent software. With the growing experience of business users with AI, they are now increasingly able to distinguish between AI and non-AI. This will enable them to deliberately deal with different AI-disciplines in the coming year - such as machine learning (ML), decisioning, natural language processing (NLP) or neural networks.

2. AI becomes more standard in companies. After a few initial failures, the use of AI has now become more predictable for companies and it also delivers better and better results. Hence, the trust of companies is growing continuously. By 2020, they will understand AI best practices better and will use them more and more.

3. Companies will increasingly make use of machine learning (ML), although experts in this field are still rare to find. Therefore, marketplaces, like e.g. Amazon Sagemaker, which provide ML "as a service", will become increasingly important in 2020. Companies can use them to integrate pre-made AI models into their architectures without the need for an entire army of data scientists.

4. Many employees, who fear that AI technologies could make them lose their jobs, will gradually overcome these fears as they gain more and more personal experience with AI and better understand the advantages that it offers them: namely to be able to work more efficiently and successfully and thus to advance their own careers.

5. AI governance becomes a new discipline. In 2019, there was a lot of discussion about the trustworthiness, responsibility and ethics of AI. So far, however, there have not been many concrete consequences, but exactly that will change in 2020. AI governance will become a real discipline this year, partly driven by automated testing in AI-based software solutions.

6. AI in customer contact becomes empathetic. A major challenge when using AI in customer service is its lack of empathy. For example, many customers find chatbots too profit-oriented and therefore continue to prefer conversations with real people. In 2020, many companies will start to change that by embedding empathy in their AI-based customer interactions.

“Although AI has finally overcome many of its teething problems, there are still major challenges to be overcome”,  Dr. Kay Knoche, Solution Consultant Next Best Action Marketing at Pegasystems points out. “Above all, it is important to equip artificial intelligence with ethics and empathy in order to make it even more suitable for humans”, he concludes.

By Daniela La Marca