AI-based conversational interfaces are important

2020 will be a hyper-connected society

Choi Yoon-seok, Executive Director of Gartner Korea, summarized the mobile and digital business markets and provided a 2018 outlook, explaining that the society ultimately created through the evolution of technology trends such as Intelligent, Digital, and Mesh is 'hyper-connected'.

He added, “Looking at global device shipments, mobile devices have caught up in 10 years with the volume of PCs shipped over 30 years,” stating, “This means we have shifted from a static environment to a dynamic environment, and from a device-centric information system to a data-centric system.”

With the advent of the hyper-connected era, what technology trends will change business models?

It is projected that 7 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices will be connected by 2020. Currently, IoT is widely used for simple sensing or monitoring. However, it has high utility because it possesses attributes such as detection, data analysis, communication between objects, and acts.

Executive Director Choi stated, “New business models are emerging as the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence are added to mobile,” adding, “2019 will be the Post-app era, dominated by conversational interfaces such as gestures and voice.”

Gartner broadly categorized technology trends into three types: Intelligent, Digital, and Mesh. For 2018, it identified the following as the top 10 strategic technologies: AI-enhanced systems, intelligent apps and analytics, intelligent things, digital twins, edge computing, conversational platforms, immersive experiences, blockchain, event-driven models, and continuous and adaptive approaches to risk and trust assessment.

The top 10 technologies defined by Gartner are selected based on three criteria: unproven technologies, technologies showing an inflection point opportunity within 2 to 3 years, and technologies with two sides.

Executive Director Choi explained, “Artificial intelligence will be applied across all industries to implement more flexible and autonomous systems,” adding that “what companies actually need to adopt, rather than General AI, is Narrow AI.” This means that instead of adopting AI capable of thinking like a human, there is a need to introduce AI that is trained by inputting data to perform specific tasks.

The introduction of such artificial intelligence becomes an important technology for creating conversational interfaces, or conversational platforms. He stated, “Interactive platforms will provide new experiences based on various senses such as sight, hearing, smell, taste, sensation, heat/humidity, and location,” adding, “The value of interactive platforms lies in technology understanding and teaching people, rather than people understanding and learning technology as they have traditionally done.”