Predictions 2017

SureSkills Kevin Reid, chief technical officer

I know of one customer that recently saved around 40% in annual costs for its Office 365 licence alone by doing this. In our experience, once you start looking at one cloud service like office automation in a more granular way, you apply the same thinking to other services like Salesforce for CRM or Slack for collaboration.

IT professionals can invest these savings in new capabilities for the business, such as a business intelligence project that delivers actionable information for faster, more accurate decision making.

Another aspect to the ‘as a service’ model is that infrastructure is more distributed than ever, and no longer under the direct control of an in-house IT team. This makes cybersecurity a critical consideration, so a related piece of advice for 2017 is to understand where your data is and what controls your provider applies, so you can guarantee the integrity, sovereignty and privacy of that data, aligned with your organisation’s policies – not your provider’s.

Open-Source: Businesses need to consider best strategy for AI models i.e. cloud vendor, customised or open-source. I think a combination of open-source core machine learning platforms supported by customised RandD using cloud vendors for compute capability.

Big Data: Data is the key to successful AI since the efficiency of machine learning is based on constant improvement through better and wider training data, as the adoption of AI grows the volumes of data that businesses need and manage will grow substantially.

Data Security: Requirements and regulations for data access and extraction will be upgraded to support secure end to end data access for project delivery and accelerated innovation. Artificial Intelligence will make some things easier, however it will also expand the vulnerabilities of the digital eco system.

Regulation: More and more regulation will drive the need to adopt AI strategy to stay compliant, Artificial intelligence will continue to support the application of regulation in an efficient manner and identify areas of risk for businesses to focus on by putting models into production to make a real impact on business KPIs.

Partnering: Businesses will gain a competitive advantage quickly by innovating faster in partnership. AI is evolving and experience coupled with knowledge of how to apply it to different business domains will be key to make future projects more effective and valuable.

At Singlepoint we see growth opportunities that exist which enable our clients to make ongoing developments and innovations in this ever-changing environment.