The Mighty Bamboo

The mighty bamboo, when planted, doesn’t display any growth in the first four years, in spite of constant nurturing with water, fertile soil and sunlight. In the fifth year, the plant offers a pleasant surprise - a growth spurt of up to 80 feet in six weeks. The lack of visible change however is not to be mistaken for stagnation because in the first few years, the plant grows below the ground strengthening its roots, in preparation for speedy growth at the perfect time.

What’s all this talk about bamboo you ask? Let me explain the analogy. Much like the mighty bamboo, Artificial Intelligence (AI), a term first coined in in 1956 by John McCarthy, took over five decades to become a “mainstream technology”. While there was little visible growth in the initial years, a lot was happening to develop the AI ecosystem. During this time, research on this subject continued to evolve and got more sophisticated while multiple streams of technologies started to come together to make an impact, including sensors, connectivity, highly sophisticated software, robotics and astronomical growth in processing power. Together, these became the biggest drivers of the Fourth Industrial revolution.

Based on IDC research, spending on cognitive and AI systems will reach $77.6 billion in 2022, more than three times the $24.0 billion forecast for 2018. The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for the 2017-2022 forecast period will be 37.3%. The cognitive/AI use cases that will see the largest spending totals are automated customer service agents ($2.9 billion), automated threat intelligence and prevention systems ($1.9 billion), sales process recommendation and automation ($1.7 billion) and automated preventive maintenance ($1.7 billion)1.