Top Trends in Data & AI for 2021: insight engines.

Aiimi’s Head of Marketing Nick Barrow shares his prediction for 2021's top trend in data and AI. Find out more about Insight Engines and why this emerging technology will help businesses drive true insight from their information in 2021.

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What do you think will be the top trend in Data and AI for 2021?

For me, it's going to be the continued rise of Insight Engines, an emerging technology. I think we're finally starting to see real-world, practical use cases of AI centred around intelligent discovery platforms.

The industry has been guilty of harping on for a long time about being able to unlock the potential of data and information right across the enterprise. But I guess it's only really now – with advances in NLP (Natural Language Processing), classification, enrichment, data science, these kinds of technologies – that we’ve started to unlock and deliver on that promise.

What’s so great about it?

The key is being able to exploit and unlock the full potential of information, because the majority of information and data across enterprises is considered dark or misunderstood and unclassified.

The difference an Insight Engine brings is that it starts to add value to all the information across the enterprise, whether that's structured information, unstructured content, or structured data. Connecting it together and contextualising it allows you to enrich that information to do something with it. Imagine technology that can serve you information you never knew even existed, giving you true insight around a topic or theme.

Really, the goal is to drive added value and insight – true insight – from the information you've got across the business, to make decisions faster or bring your company in line with whatever strategic objectives or compliance challenges it has. To do that, you need to understand everything about the information and data you have at your disposal and get that under control.

Forgetting about data and AI, what’s the one thing you’re hoping for in 2021?

It would be nice to meet some of my team members that I've never actually met before in person.

We've got a strange situation where you have people that have worked for the company for a long period of time, but they haven't actually set foot in the office. We haven't actually met them in person, so that would be nice. I guess just getting out of our little bubble, and the bubbles that we've all lived in, before we all get cabin fever. It would be very nice to go out for a bite to eat or go to the pub for a drink.

I have a hunch that in 2021, we're going to see widespread adoption of these sorts of tech in a myriad of different ways. It's going to be seen as a fundamental part of an information and data strategy that underpins all the goals and ambitions of an organisation – to try to manage, control, and operationalise data, and, finally, put AI to work.