4 AI Trends: It's All About Scale in 2022 (So Far)

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The July heat is upon us, which also means that we are exactly halfway through 2023. So it seems like the time is right to pause and ask: what are the main trends in AI as of mid-2022?

The colossal AI trend that all other AI trends serve is the growing scale of artificial intelligence in organizations, said Whit Andrews, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner Research. In other words, more and more companies are entering an era where AI is an aspect of every new project.

“If you want to think of a new thing, the new thing that will be most appealing will be something you can do with AI at scale,” Andrews said. "The people skills are there, the tools are less expensive, and it's now easier to access data that might be relevant to what you're trying to accomplish."

According to Sameer Maskey, founder and CEO of Fusemachines and adjunct associate professor at Columbia University, the shift to scaling AI is enabled by more data, prioritizing the data strategy and cheaper computing power.

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“We are also at the point where many companies are now seeing the value of AI,” he said. "And they want to do it on a large scale," Maskey said.

Furthermore, Julian Sanchez, director of emerging technologies at John Deere, points out that the problem with AI is that it "feels like magic". There's a natural leap, he explained, from the idea of ​​"look what it can do" to "I just want the magic to evolve".

Large-scale AI isn't magic, it's data

"Everyone is trying to figure out how to get to the next level," Sanchez said. But the real reason AI can be used at scale, he pointed out, has nothing to do with magic. It's because of the data.

"I know the only way John Deere got there was through a rigorous and thorough process of data collection and data labeling," he said. "So now we need to find a way to get the right data collected and implemented in a way that's not that onerous."

But some experts point out that most companies remain immature in their AI efforts, in terms of the data, resources and knowledge needed to scale.

"I think there's still a bit of a conflict between testing capacity and use cases versus scaling AI," said Di Mayze, global head of data and AI at agency holding company WPP. One client, she added, called her efforts “pilot-palooza.” "They're trying to find ways to tie together all the different trials to enable large-scale AI capability, but companies are realizing that they have to get their data in order before they can worry about putting on the scale of AI," she said.

Here are four scale-related AI trends that are all the rage in mid-2022:

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