5 ways Forrester predicts AI will be “indispensable” by 2023

Forrester Research’s recently released predictions report for artificial intelligence highlights what most have already noticed: AI adoption has evolved from an emerging, fun trend to experiment with to a legitimate priority for enterprises.

In short, get on the AI ​​train or stay behind.

The “get on board with AI now” message has been getting clear for several years now, but this year’s stats seem to point to a significant evolution: According to Forrester’s Data and Analytics Survey, 2022 [subscription required]73% of data and analytics decision makers build AI technologies and 74% see a positive impact on their organizations from using AI.

No vertical industry fails to find opportunities to implement AI, and companies at all maturity levels are transforming fundamental functions in the organization, the forecast report finds, as AI adoption continues to grow in 2023 and become more creative, reliable and reliable. will be optimized. ”

Forrester made five evidence-based predictions for the use of enterprise AI in 2023, which were culled from about 15-20, Rowan Curran, AI and ML analyst at Forrester, told VentureBeat.

“We narrowed it down to the predictions we thought were likely to happen and had a good amount of evidence to back it up,” he said.

1. Forrester says 10% of Fortune 500 companies will generate content with AI tools.

With the evolution in transformer networks and pre-trained models (particularly large language models such as BERT and GPT-3), generative AI is fully part of today’s zeitgeist.

Forrester’s forecast report listed leading players such as Baidu and Huawei, which have launched digital content services powered by computer vision (CV); startups such as Synthesia and HourOne.ai, which are using AI to accelerate video content generation; and Taichi Graphics, which raised $50 million to create resume-driven digital content. And of course, popular text-to-image tools like DALL-E and Stable Diffusion enable content creators of all types (even tech analysts) to quickly generate content.

Curran said the pace of AI change is so fast, with such widespread adoption of large language models in different use cases, that this prediction already feels almost outdated.

“I probably should have scaled it up,” he said. “I think maybe I would have revised it to 10% of Fortune 500 workers will be using these tools because to me that speaks to the way this AI trend is evolving – I think it will bubble up from the bottom as much as it will from the top. ”

He added that he could also have explained more about the wide range of use cases for content generation, from generating images for design ideas to the text side – generating marketing copy at scale or summarizing complex textual topics quickly and easily.

2. TuringBots write 10% of global code and tests.

The development of AI writing code — which Forrester coined “TuringBots” in 2020 — was a huge trend in 2022 that will only accelerate in 2023, Curran said.

“There has been a lot of excitement in the smaller developer and open source community in recent years,” he explains. “But over the past year, more entrepreneurial companies have begun to integrate [TuringBots] directly into wider developer tools, for example by aligning them with Codex.”

According to the report, reinforcement learning and large language models have accelerated the development, accuracy and implementation of these products, which automatically generate clean code based on requirements expressed in natural language. In 2023, Forrester expects tools such as Amazon Code-Whisperer, Code Bot, GitHub Co-Pilot and Tabnine to take over more aspects of the software development lifecycle.

“People are developing TuringBots that are more focused on the infrastructure and connective tissue of applications, which can be a very repetitive task,” Curran says. “The adoption of TuringBots for all these minutia-like tasks that are essential for business applications, especially when they need to be connected to all kinds of different systems, is what’s really going to drive the change here.”

3. One in four tech execs will report on AI governance to their board, according to Forrester.

With AI regulation on the rise and the demand for trust in AI growing, it’s probably no surprise that one in four CIOs and CTOs will lead AI governance by 2023. The Forrester report predicts that AI
governance will become a board-level topic, merging cybersecurity and compliance, demonstrating the great need for risk mitigation and oversight.

“The warning is really aimed at enterprises that recognize that they need to both understand and monitor their AI capabilities, but also continuously be able to understand if they are not accurate enough, if they are meeting business needs, and if they are business-to-business. technical communication flow,” he said. “I think we’ll see a lot more of that.”

The report highlighted Forrester data showing that 46% of data and analytics and technology decision makers are looking for partners to implement AI that is critical to the business. It pointed out that Accenture, BCG, Deloitte, EY and McKinsey already offer auditing and executive training on AI governance.

Tech execs, the report said, “should embrace their new AI governance role and use the opportunity to
implement ethical technology strategy across the organization.”

4. Forrester says AI in retail healthcare will reduce time-to-care by 25%.

“This one was conceived by my colleagues on our healthcare team,” says Curran. “They were able to identify that failure to show up to appointments is one of the biggest problems in healthcare, a huge problem that can actually be attacked by artificial intelligence in a way that it could never be before, because there is so much complexity involved. was around the actual planning itself.”

Now, retail health care will use intelligent planning to eliminate the $150 billion health care no-show problem, the Forrester report predicts. For example, Walgreens is partnering with Nuance to schedule 24/7 vaccine appointments for COVID-19, and Minute Clinic at CVS is partnering with Google to enable same-day scheduling through Google Search.

In 2023, the report said AI will “use insurance coverage, diagnosis, location, availability and cancellation risk factors to optimize scheduling workflows. Innovative companies will use this data to fill precious gaps from last minute cancellations – intelligent systems will contact patients on waiting list
based on the predicted probability of responding. By solving this problem, the average waiting time of 20.6 days to see a doctor is reduced by 25%.”

“This just shows how we see AI evolving into the most basic and fundamental problems of some of these spaces, in addition to more flashy kinds of use cases,” Curran said. “The retail health care piece will be a game changer if it is effective – a 25% reduction in time to care would be huge.”

5. Virtual assistants don’t have to appear human.

As conversational AI use cases expand across the organization, the Forrester report predicted that companies will drop the human pretense for virtual assistants to improve trust, particularly in the B2B space.

Today, Forrester found that 65% of B2B marketers use AI-powered virtual assistants to engage with customers and employees. Sometimes the virtual assistants pretend to be human, which organizations have found makes customers feel cheated. So companies will embrace transparency in identifying the AI ​​assistants as virtual.

“For something like business selling, when a customer is spending thousands or millions of dollars on something, you probably want to talk to a human throughout that entire process and not necessarily through a digital system,” Curran said. “So now enterprises will be completely transparent every step of the way about whether this is a digital system or whether it is a human system.”