One can expect to see more, not less of AI in the coming year. More jobs would be created rather than snatched away by AI; at least this is what tech giants are believing.
Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos in a statement on the future of AI said, “I predict that, because of artificial intelligence and its ability to automate certain tasks that in the past were impossible to automate, not only will we have a much wealthier civilization, but the quality of work will go up very significantly and a higher fraction of people will have callings and careers relative to today.”

How will AI develop in 2019?

Tech biggies like Alibaba, Google, and Microsoft, have come up with ambitious plans to ‘democratize‘ AI.
Google seems to be spearheading this revolution through its offering, Tensorflow. Tensorflow is helping small businesses and developers innovate through its open-source machine learning framework.
Another AI project by Google, Jigsaw leverages artificial intelligence to detect toxic comments and hate speech which has proven to be quite successful. This tool assigns a toxicity score to a piece of text based on numerous parameters.
In a bid to expand their horizons, Google is targeting emerging economies like India to expand its offerings. Indian policymakers and government officials are being trained in AI tools to streamline governance. NITI Aayog, a policy think-tank of the government of India, is partnering with Google to work on an array of initiatives to help build an Artificial Intelligence (AI) ecosystem across the country.
Amitabh Kant, Chief Executive Officer of NITI Aayog, said in a statement: “NITI’s partnership with Google will unlock massive training initiatives, support start-ups and encourage AI research through PhD scholarships, all of which contribute to the larger idea of a technologically-empowered New India,”
Through their collaboration, the organizations are planning to conduct hands-on training programmes to sensitize and educate lawmakers and technical experts in government about relevant AI tools and how they can be used to streamline governance.

On the same lines, Chinese tech behemoth Alibaba aims to bring sweeping and disruptive changes to China’s vibrant business landscape.
The machine intelligence technology division leads Alibaba’s efforts into AI. The division is working in areas including computer vision, speech recognition, optimization, and natural language processing.
One of the projects underway comes in the form of AliMe, an AI-enabled chatbot Alibaba developed that recognizes what people say both in terms of the text and the speech.
Not limiting the use cases of AI to just e-commerce and retail, Alibaba has ventured AI in farming and agriculture. On this front, the company is coming up with initiatives that can carry out a variety of things including, tracking animal IDs, detecting nutrition management, etc.
“Alibaba has changed the everyday life of the Chinese in China. Looking forward, our visionary leader, Jack Ma, wants us to be able to reach two billion consumers and to help 10 million businesses around the world. That’s a huge call, but we already have half of the platforms in place.” said Alibaba’s chief scientist Xiaofeng Ren, in a statement to CeBIT.
Meanwhile, Microsoft too is getting on the AI bandwagon. It’s CEO Satya Nadella in a bid to demonstrate that Microsoft can develop state-of-art services and still be a trusted provider for preserving user’s data has come up with a plan to expand the offerings of its digital assistant Cortana. Microsoft is targeting the office space to introduce a workplace-specific service to integrate AI into more of its enterprise services.

What will become increasingly important?

At the helm of all these AI developments that planned is, ‘Data.’ According to an industry insider, the benefits of AI can only be reaped if the data being used is fit for purpose.
Major AI companies are leading in this domain solely because of the fact that they have a lot of data for the algorithm to be trained on. For these techniques, to prove fruitful, it is extremely critical to have smart and relevant data. The performance of algorithms is more dependent on quantity rather than the quality of the data. Unless you can feed all the knowledge manually, it is vital to have an abundance of data for the algorithm to be trained on.
Artificial Intelligence rests upon the idea of mimicking how humans learn. All of our life experiences act as a set of data for us to learn. Thus a successful AI needs to mirror human behaviour to get successful.
Let us change the frame of reference and drill down to some of the significant developments that AI is definitely going to witness in 2019.

1. More jobs will be created by AI than lost to it

A utopian workless future will still be a distant fantasy in the coming year. It is still far from reality that the rise of machines will take over our jobs and cause a social strife all over the world.According to a Gartner report, as many as 1.8 million jobs would be lost to automation, especially in manufacturing, but also, 2.3 million would be up for grabs!
Let us consider a scenario to understand the situation better – Consider a garment factory, imagine a machine operator in a factory. Although a portion of his/her job could get automated, they will definitely have other roles, for instance, managing inventory and overseeing junior workers, which computers cannot supervise. Also consider the difference between a worker in a US garment factory and its counterpart in Vietnam: the American unit is more likely to be technologically forward, and a typical worker’s day will likely include a higher number of non-routine tasks that can’t be automated.
Undoubtedly, it is fairly accurate to say that non-manual jobs will be lost to AI, but more and more will be created as well! Repetitive tasks wouldn’t need to be performed by humans, and we will get more time to utilize our creative thinking and exemplary abilities to perform tangible tasks.
Industries such as education, IT services, public sector, especially healthcare will see a drastic infusion of new job opportunities pertaining to AI.
Although when it comes to doctors and lawyer, AI service providers have made a concerted effort to present their technology as something which can work alongside human professionals, assisting them with repetitive tasks while leaving the “final call” to them.

2. AI assistants will become a fixture in enterprises

AI is so intertwined in our everyday lives that we don’t even realize it, from a simple Google search to shopping at Amazon, or watching Netflix – AI is at work to provide us with the best-personalized experience.
With significant product releases from the likes of Apple, Samsung, Google, Amazon, and several other vendors – It is evident that people are embracing the comfortable and conversational modes of interaction.
2018 was the year of consumer voice assistant, 2019 will be the year where enterprises will see an influx of voice assistants in their day-to-day operations. Already, enterprises have begun realizing the importance of conversational technologies and are leveraging them as an extension of their businesses to support a wide range of tasks.
NLP (Natural Language Processing) and Machine Learning AI assistants will become increasingly efficient, thanks to their exposure to more and more information about how we communicate. By the end of 2019, these assistants will become so sophisticated that they would be able to anticipate our behavior, read our facial expressions, and even understand our habits.

3. AI will venture beyond tech companies

Many AI luminaries believe that AI has a much broader scope outside the tech domain. Citing use cases from a recent McKinsey report which found that AI will generate revenue of more than $ 10 trillion in GDP by 2030.
According to Andrew Ng, co-founder of Google Brain, “I think a lot of the stories to be told next year (2019) would be in AI applications outside of the software industry. As an industry, we’ve done a quite decent job of helping companies like Google and Baidu, but also Facebook and Microsoft — which I have nothing to do with — but even companies like Square and Airbnb, Pinterest, are starting to use some AI capabilities. I think the next massive wave of value creation will be when you can get a manufacturing company or agriculture devices company or a health care company to develop dozens of AI solutions to help their businesses.”
Many companies are recognizing the importance of catching up to AI technology, lest they be left behind. Here are 11 industries that are experiencing disruption.
     • Agriculture
     • Retail
     • Manufacturing
     • Law
     • Automotive
Although the domain that would reap the maximum benefits will definitely be healthcare. The following could be significant developments in healthcare:
     • Managing Medical Records and Other Data
     • Doing Repetitive Jobs
     • Virtual Nurses
     • Precision Medicine
     • Health Monitoring
     • Healthcare System Analysis
     • Drug Creation

4. SMEs will see a significant transformation in 2019

The small and medium-sized businesses are bound to see a major overhaul in 2019. This is precisely due to the recent commitments by tech giants – Organizations like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. are offering open-source frameworks that could easily be integrated with the current business processes.
In 2019, SMEs would no longer need to break the bank to incorporate AI into their operations. By leveraging existing platforms like Tensorflow (By Google), Keras, SparkMLlib, Caffe, etc., SMEs could save considerable cost and time which would have otherwise been required in developing and designing the products in-house.
Apart from this 2019 would also witness an influx of new AI-powered analytics tools. These tools are beneficial for businesses who don’t want to invest heavily in Artificial Intelligence and are still looking to reap the benefits of it. Analytics tools offer a gateway for small businesses to leverage the potential of AI even if they do not possess a vast amount of data.

Must Read: How Can AI Benefit Small Businesses

5. AI skills will become increasingly in demand

Organizations have been facing an impertinent issue of lack of technical skills required for developing to-the-mark AI products.

AI-related skills, as well as in related areas such as machine learning are in short supply today. Due to the relative newness of this technology, most educational institutions haven’t yet introduced a dedicated curriculum in their syllabus for AI and deep learning. This has created a crevice of sorts in the demand and supply of skilled AI professionals who are good with these skills.

As the democratization of AI is on the lines – It has to become viable for both, the tech giants and small and medium-sized businesses to recruit AI professionals easily.
Moreover, AI professionals require extensive on-the-job training, and as of now, there aren’t enough experienced AI professionals to take over leadership roles required by organizations who are just beginning to introduce AI in their services.
2019 would see tech giants such as Amazon and Google invest globally in expanding their talent pool. The Google Brain facility in Toronto is exclusively dedicated to research in AI; also Amazon has established an AI-focused lab in England and plans to build a similar facility in Spain.

Wrapping Up

The application and use case of Artificial Intelligence is beginning to encompass more and more businesses and is becoming a critical aspect of our everyday lives. As this article suggests, the use of machine learning is not just limited to the more conventional industries. Its use goes far beyond what one can imagine – Even bloggers nowadays are utilizing machine learning algorithms to engage users and improve their conversion rates.
Many companies already see the competitive edge AI-powered solutions can give and we can easily anticipate now more than ever the unusual uses of artificial intelligence in the future.
But the elephant in the room certainly needs to be addressed – The advancement and the evolution of AI comes with abundant risks. Due to its relative infancy, no proper regulations have been put in place to ensure that this gold mine doesn’t get exploited by notorious elements.

We urgently need to account for ethics and issues of bias during the development of these AI-based products, whereas today organizations easily overlook these things.

Considering how gruesome it is in finding the perfect tech partners for developing an efficient AI product. EngineerBabu houses a talented bunch of AI professionals who have proven their mettle by creating hundreds of successful AI products based on Machine Learning and Deep Learning technologies.

Contact Us for a free consultation call, we would love to guide you. In the meanwhile, check out some of our amazing AI products, right here.

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The post Artificial Intelligence in 2020 | AI Development appeared first on EngineerBabu Blog.

As Mr. White used to say – “I am the one who knocks”.
This new explosion in IT is definitely the one that is knocking on every VCs and investors doorstep. This could be precisely said because the overall investment in Financial Technology has already surpassed the 2017 results in mid-year itself.
Let’s take a look at some of the major breakthroughs that occurred in FinTech this year,
• The acquisition of WorldPay
WorldPay (now WorldPay, Inc) was publicly listed payment processing platform which provided online services for accepting electronic transactions by a variety of methods such as credit card, bank based or direct transfer. It also offered a range of merchant services and operated in an extensive demographic (400,000 merchants in 146 countries) across the globe. It was acquired by Vantiv, a leading provider of payment processing services and related technology solutions for financial institutions. The $12.9 billion acquisition came as a significant step forward for the two giants.
WorldPay which competes with the likes of VeriFone, PayPal, Stripe and several others gained significant momentum after the acquisition.
• The Funding of Ant Financial
It didn’t come as a surprise to many when China’s Ant Financial raised about $14 billion in its last seed round. After all, it is backed by one of the biggest names in the industry (Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.).

The funding made Ant the world’s leading FinTech firm. The funding undeniably equipped them with enormous resources for expansion. The affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. is alreadyChina’s biggest online payments service and even controls the world’s largest money market fund.
“Now, with the help of our partners, we are going to accelerate our strategy,” Ant’s CEO Eric Jing said in a statement to Bloomberg.

Recommended Read: Top 10 FinTech Companies Transforming Finance in USA

Analyzing the above developments we could accurately predict where FinTech is headed in 2020.
Let’s take a sneak peek,

Fintech Trends in 2020

1. RegTech is here to stay

Compliance, Complexity, Cost and Bureaucratic processes have always stifled the development of the finance industry. The long and tedious processes have proven to be a bane for the industry. This led to the reincarnation of a morbid industry that never saw a significant thrust since the spurt of the dot-com bubble. Consequently, we are seeing a lot of financial firms shifting to Regulatory Technology (RegTech) to bridge those gaps.
One must wonder- What exactly is RegTech??

It is essentially the use of technology across financial services functions to ease financial tasks such as regulatory compliance. It has a significant impact on financial services.
In simpler words, it is a technology that helps financial service firms get better at dealing with regulation. For instance, Know Your Customer (KYC). But the benefits of RegTech far exceeds than just KYC.
As the world is moving from big data to ‘smart data’, technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning are enabling companies to gain insights into regulatory practices, automate reporting, carry out a meaningful inspection of critical compliance risk areas and even potentially create an end-to-end view of compliance.
Companies are using RegTech to deal with the vast amount of data they are generating. More data handled the right way also means better information. Many VCs and investors have already started riding on the RegTech bandwagon, due to which there has been a significant increase in the investment across this lucrative sector.
There has been an investment of $1.37 billion in the first half of 2018 – more than for all of 2017. RegTech has a promising future ahead, and these new-age startups will be the ones to watch out for in the upcoming calendar.

1. Governance.io / governance.com:Based out of Luxembourg, and founded by brothers Bert and Rob Boerman, this RegTech startup provides smart technology and support services to facilitate the control of regulated companies. They raised their Series A round this year, Governance.io has established itself as a platform for good governance through the use of technology and support.
Deployed at-premise or in the cloud, the solution allows all stakeholders to collaborate on data, documentation, and workflows. It also provides a white-labeled client portal to exchange data and collaborate on meetings and due diligence questionnaires.
A network of governance supports clients that can provide hosting, operational support, regulatory advisory, and other support services.

2. Advanced logic analytics:
This UK based startup was founded in 2015. Riding on new age technologies, ALA has established a stronghold in the Compliance sector. It offers enterprise-wide big data and financial analytics solutions for buy and sell-side institutions and other financial firms. Their data science-led business offering and AI driven algorithms bring alternative data insights for financial institutions. By using machine learning-based analytic techniques, ALA develops and apply risk calculations. Communications and other source data are scored against a series of Key Risk Indicators (KRIs) to quickly pick up on any issues that could cause problems.

3. Agreement express:
Agreement Express provides onboarding automation software for financial services. Their platform allows wealth management and payments companies to deliver customer application, approval, and onboarding services across their offerings. They provide seamless integration to the back-office for compliance and risk workflows which is one of their most sought-after features.
4. Alyne:
The differentiating factor for this Munich based startup has been the market it caters. Alyne offerings include cybersecurity, risk management and compliance capabilities across all industries of all magnitudes. They call themselves “Business focused Software as a Service”.
5. Surety:
Surety caters to a niche segment of Regulatory Technology. They provide technology to protect the integrity of digital information using cryptographic time-stamping service. They are also one of the prominent providers of regulatory services such as IP protection and digital footprint preservation. Surety sanctions users to apply tamper-proof digital “Seals” to almost any form of electronic information. They are easily deployable across enterprise or cloud, providing long-term and independent proof with the guarantee that the information hasn’t been tampered since.
6. AppZen:
Appzen is an extremely impressive AI platform that utilizes machine learning to audit contracts, expense reports, and invoices. It integrates with all major ERPs, invoicing software, and expense automation products. This six-year-old startup is valued at $175 million and has recently raised $35 million in its Series B round. Appzen enjoys clientele such as Airbnb, Amazon, Citi Bank, Salesforce, Intuit, and 650 major organizations.
“The goal is to address all the domains in the CFO organization,” AppZen’s Chief Executive Officer, Anant Kale said in a statement.
7. AQMETRICS: 
AQMETRICS provides GRC (Governance, Risk & Compliance) software for financial services firms trading on the global financial markets. Headquartered in Kildare, Ireland (EU), AQMETRICS has raised almost $3.3 Million in investment so far. They specialize in providing unified market surveillance and compliance solutions to investment management companies. AQMETRICS serves a suite of cloud-based solutions and supports a full range of global regulatory reporting.

8. Arachnys:
Arachnys’ vision is focused on exploiting the evolving markets rather than already lucrative ones because they believe emerging markets, which are often fragmented and poorly organized will see an explosion of business information. Unlike their RegTech counterparts, Arachnys, therefore, targets the Eurasian market more extensively. Their primary emphasis remains attractive markets like China, India, Russia, and the Middle East.
Arachnys domain expertise caters to Customer Risk Evaluation lifecycle by using cutting-edge technologies such as Robotic Process Automation, Machine Learning, Intelligence, and Natural Language Processing.
Their products are specifically tailored to serve a diverse customer base and are extensively customizable.

2. Artificial Intelligence:

In the early days of banking, bankers used to have personal connections with their customers. Each step of the banking process involved customer-client interaction. But due to the digitization of the banking process, this personal connection has been lost. So, is it possible to leverage the same technology to get that human interaction back?

Many believe, A.I can be leveraged to bring back that connection.
Artificial intelligence (A.I.) will continue to govern FinTech in new ways. In 2020, we could see companies use A.I. to develop new commerce interfaces, with the number of companies looking into voice set to increase.
Let’s delve into the potential use-cases of A.I:

• Credit Scores:
In traditional banking infrastructure, there were a lot of customers who were underserved and ignored. They couldn’t apply for a loan because they didn’t have a credit score. Many startups have stepped up to bridge that crevice.
Various applications are coming up to assist customers who want to apply for a loan but have no credit history for the bank to review. Many tools and technologies such as Psychometric Analysis, Behavioral Detection, Predictive Analysis, and mining of the borrower’s data through the web, social media, geo-location and even browser history are being deployed to ensure a detailed evaluation of the potential borrower. These technologies let banks build a vivid picture that allows them to evaluate whether a candidate is creditworthy.
• Security and Fraud Control:
The banking sector is the single most targeted area by hackers and fraudsters for obvious reasons. This anomaly allows for the development of some of the most innovative and hi-tech solutions in this realm. Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Optimized Algorithms, and numerous other tools and technologies are being deployed by financial firms and new-age startups to address this issue. Many A.I tools have also come into use to analyze and observe user’s critical behavioral patterns and issue warnings in case of possible security infringement. Due to these developments, it was observed in the Q3 that consumers are increasingly becoming more at ease at using A.I-driven applications and digital payment gateways to carry out their financial transactions.
• Customer Support Automation:
Time and again it has been witnessed that most of the customer-facing processes are becoming obsolete by every passing day. They are being revolutionized by the advent of Chabots and Virtual Assistants. It could be easily figured out as to what exactly is driving that trend. Automation of customer-facing services address one problem that has always costed companies in billions of dollar – Human Error.

AI-driven platforms utilizing Natural Language Processing (NLP) are turning more human than ever. This combined with no possible error in delivery makes it an ideal fit. Chatbots can not only answer customer queries intelligently, but they can also be integrated with social networking sites, and accept requests for applications and orders directly from social media channels.

Gartner prediction for 2018, projected more than 2 billion people would be diligently using conversational A.I to interact with virtual assistants on different platforms. The outcomes clearly surpassed the forecasts.

Recommended Read: 7 Tips for Starting a Fintech Company

3. Blockchain will venture beyond Bitcoin:

The much-hyped technology upon which Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are based – The Blockchain, is all set out to venture beyond Bitcoin and will serve various other markets and domains. Keeping in mind the potential of Blockchain, several banks and financial firms have planned for considerable investments in the domain. Many companies have rolled out pilot programs across a range of industries, including – financial services, healthcare and even global logistics. Earlier in 2018, several banks in Asia conducted a pilot in which Blockchain was used to transfer funds across continents in a matter of few seconds.

The following could be the potential use cases that can come into light in 2020,
1. Weapons Tracking:Blockchain could help tremendously in gun control and weapon accountability. This could easily be one of the single most significant reform that could change the entire state of firearm distribution. And gun control being such a trending topic on almost every new network. Blockchain could create a completely transparent and never-changing registry ledger that allows law enforcement to track down weapons and guns ownership. It could also be utilized to keep a record of weapons sold privately.

2. Digital Voting:If you are worried about booth capturing or voter fraud. Then Blockchain will offer you a sigh of relief. Blockchain would offer the ability to vote digitally and at the same time be transparent enough that any regulator could see if any irregularity or fraud transpires. The decentralized nature and its immutability would ensure your vote truly counts.

3. Digital IDs:
Digital IDs with the help of Blockchain would be a boon for the impoverished and developing nations by giving them access to financial services. Tech giant Microsoft is already planning to venture into the domain by creating digital IDs within its Authenticator app.
4. Real Estate:
Since paper trails are frequently a source of confusion, it is entirely possible that Blockchain will take paper out of the equation. So, if one plans to buy or sell land, a house, or even a car you’ll just require to transfer the title. Thanks to Blockchain these titles will get stored on the network allowing for a crystal clear picture of the legal ownership.
5. Record keeping of medical records:
Patient privacy would be utterly discreet by the introduction of Blockchain in the pharmaceutical sector. The patients who possess the key to access these records will be in complete ownership of their data and will control who can access or view that data. Thus strengthening the HIPAA laws that are designed to protect their privacy.
6. Managing IoT (Internet of Things) networks:
Many networking corporations have announced that they are working on a Blockchain based application that will monitor the Internet of Things network. Such an application would help determine the authenticity of the devices on the network and would continuously do so for devices entering and leaving the network. This could drive a significant shift in device-to-device integration.
Recommended Read: How is BlockChain Revolutionizing Banking and Financial Markets

4. Financial Inclusion:

In the largest ever gathering of FinTech firms in Singapore, Indian Prime Minister, Narendra Modi introduced attractive policies and plans to invite investors to the Indian landscape.
“I say this to all the FinTech companies and startups: India is your best destination,” said Modi, the keynote speaker at the Singapore FinTech Festival.
In Nigeria, FinTech startup NetPlus has come with a solution that provides simple and reliant digital payment system to the consumers. So, consumers of Nigeria who were generally skeptical when it comes to e-commerce, have embraced the platform.
Developments such as these are proving to be an excellent boost for evolving markets such as India, Brazil, Nigeria, Indonesia, and several others. Earlier when the FinTech hubs used to be just San Francisco, Singapore, and London, such developments are driving investors to these huge rewarding markets. This shift in the market will gain significant traction next year and developing nations would possible see tremendous growth in investments across FinTech and RegTech. Also, several financial establishments are planning to open up new premises in these countries which definitely suggests what is expected to come our way in 2020.

Wrapping up

My prediction for 2020:

It is big, It is growing, and It is disruptive.

FinTech would be the second-most significant transformation in Finance, since the first permanent banknotes. I believe, Financial Technology would not only disrupt the way we purchase and invest, but it would also alter the very definition of money itself.
FinTech 3.0 is upon us and banks, and financial firms will enjoy a roller-coaster ride riding on the FinTech wagon.  2020 will be the year of banks acquiring FinTech firms, or waiting for their slow demise. Those who catch the FinTech train would bolster, and the rest would be gasping for air.
After all, it is true what they say – You snooze, You lose.
EngineerBabuteam excels in creating fintech products utilizing the latest tech stacks. This is why so many of our clients have gone on to acquire record funding from renowned investors. One such dear customer of ours, BankOpen, a neobanking platform, recently raised $5M in Series A led by Beenext, Speedinvest, and 3one4 Capital. We possess solid domain expertise in developing FinTech products. Feel free to reach out to us for a free consultation.
What do you think of this article? Feel free to drop your comments in case you have any suggestions or queries. We’ll get back to you with 24 to 48 hours. 

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