What will happen in the information sector in 2017?

As we look back at 2016, we can say that it has been an exciting and groundbreaking year that has changed how we handle information. Let’s look back at the major developments from 2016 and list key focus areas that will play an important role in 2017.

3 trends from 2016 that will lay basis for shaping the year 2017

Cloud

There has been a massive shift towards cloud, not only using the cloud for hosting services but building on top of cloud-based services. This has affected all IT projects, especially the Enterprise Search market when Google decided to discontinue GSA and replace it with a cloud based Springboard. More official information on Springboard is still to be published in writing, but reach out to us if you are keen on hearing about the latest developments.

There are clear reasons why search is moving towards the cloud. Some of the main ones being machine learning and the amount of data. We have an astonishing amount of information available, and the cloud is simply the best way to handle this overflow. Development in the cloud is faster, the cloud gives practically unlimited processing power and the latest developments available in the cloud are at an affordable price.

Machine learning

One area that has taken huge steps forward has been machine learning. It is nowadays being used in everyday applications. Google wrote a very informative blog post about how they use Cloud machine learning in various scenarios. But Google is not alone in this space – today, everyone is doing machine learning. A very welcome development was the formation of Partnership on AI by Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM and Microsoft.

We have seen how machine learning helps us in many areas. One good example is health care and IBM Watson managing to find a rare type of leukemia in 10 minutes. This type of expert assistance is becoming more common. While we know that it is still a long path to come before AI becomes smarter than human beings, we are taking leaps forward and this can be seen by DeepMind beating a human at the complex board game Go.

Internet of Things

Another important area is IoT. In 2016 most IoT projects have, in addition to consumer solutions, touched industry, creating a smart city, energy utilization or connected cars. Companies have realized that they nowadays can track any physical object to the benefits of being able to serve machines before they break, streamline or build better services or even create completely new business based on data knowledge. On the consumer side, we’ve in 2016 seen how IoT has become mainstream with unfortunate effect of poorly secured devices being used for massive attacks.

 

3 predictions for key developments happening in 2017

As we move towards the year 2017, we see that these trends from 2016 have positive effects on how information will be handled. We will have even more data and even more effective ways to use it. Here are three predictions for how we will see the information space evolve in 2017.

Insight engine

The collaboration with computers are changing. For decades, we have been giving tasks to computers and waited for their answer. This is slowly changing so that we start to collaborate with computers and even expect computers to take the initiative. The developments behind this is in machine learning and human language understanding. We no longer only index information and search it with free text. Nowadays, we can build a computer understanding information. This information includes everything from IoT data points to human created documents and data from other AI systems. This enables building an insight engine that can help us formulate the right question or even giving us insight based on information to a question we never ask. This will revolutionize how we handle our information how we interact with our user interfaces.

We will see virtual private assistants that users will be happy to use and train so that they can help us to use information like never before in our daily live. Google Now, in its current form, is merely the first step of something like this, being active towards bringing information to the user.

Search-driven analytics

The way we use and interact with data is changing. With collected information about pretty much anything, we have almost any information right at our fingertips and need effective ways to learn from this – in real time. In 2017, we will see a shift away from classic BI systems towards search-driven evolutions of this. We already have Kibana Dashboards with TimeLion and ThoughtSpot but these are only the first examples of how search is revolutionizing how we interact with data. Advanced analytics available for anyone within the organization, to get answers and predictions directly in graphs and diagrams, is what 2017 insights will be all about.

Conversational UIs

We have seen the rise of Chatbots in 2016. In 2017, this trend will also take on how we interact with enterprise systems. A smart conversational user interface builds on top of the same foundations as an enterprise search platform. It is highly personalized, contextually smart and builds its answers from information in various systems and information in many forms.

Imagine discussing future business focus areas with a machine that challenges us in our ideas and backs everything with data based facts. Imagine your enterprise search responding to your search with a question asking you to detail what you actually are achieving.

 

What are your thoughts on the future developement?

How do you see the 2017 change the way we interact with our information? Comment or reach out in other ways to discuss this further and have a Happy Year 2017!

 

Written by: Ivar Ekman