We look past the buzz to offer some real-world predictions for AI in business for 2021.

AI has broadened its hold on our lives throughout the past year. Also, as a worldwide pandemic compelled lots of data scientists and researchers to work remotely, AI-driven developments continued to flow from the most astute minds everywhere.

AI is quickly coming "new normal” in all our lives. Moving forward, AI will certainly be the smart center of automated, robotic, and also contactless other processes that will safeguard us all from future pandemic episodes. With the COVID-19 situation still in full swing, below are some predictions for certain AI techniques, strategies, tooling, platforms, and applications that will certainly rise to the forefront in the upcoming year:

  1. Automated governance will become key for controlling AI applications
  2. Adversarial attacks will require countermeasures to protect the AI-driven economy:
  3. Edge-based AI will crunch neural networks down to their essence
  4. Facial recognition will become a dominant AI-based contactless authentication technology
  5. Robotics will bring reinforcement learning into AI’s mainstream
  6. Deepfake technology will infuse a new generation of AI-based media-prep tools
  7. Quantum computing will find its first compelling AI application

As we turn the corner into 2021, we’ll also have a new administration in place at the White House, a fact that will shape these AI-industry trends that we can’t yet fully foresee.

Early indications are that online content authenticity, especially in election campaigns, will become a key priority for the Biden administration, and this may drive further private sector investment in the AI needed to ensure this. Beyond that, it’s unclear how, if at all, the next administration will deviate from the AI regulation principles proposed by the outgoing administration, or how all of this will drive the federal government’s fiscal, regulatory, or legislative initiatives relevant to this technology.

The best we can hope for is that the next administration actually institutes responsible regulation of AI at the federal level, while funding the R&D needed to develop credible tooling and approaches to manage AI responsibly -- or “ethically,” as the buzzword would have it -- wherever it touches our lives.