Artificial Intelligence Hype Vs Reality: The Realistic Impact of an Emerging Trend

AI continues to emerge as the next massively influential trend driving data growth and infrastructure change in our industry. However, it’s important to remember that while AI became increasingly mainstream in 2023, capturing the public’s imagination, technologists and market analysts have been talking about it for years.  

The impact on storage 

One of the cardinal rules of AI and machine learning is that the more data used to train an AI model, the more effective it will be. This relationship goes both ways: data is good for AI, and AI is good for data. As we store more and more data, quickly processing and managing it becomes increasingly valuable.   

This is where AI-enabled technology can have an immediate impact. AI makes finding the right data quick and cost-effective. We’re already seeing computer vision accomplish this in the world of video surveillance and AI-assisted metadata tagging, but we can go further. Imagine an AI-enabled archive of every quarterly report your company ever created, able to garner insights on years of company performance metrics in an instant. Or an AI assisted sales tool that’s able to perform menial tasks and dispense tips based on account activity.  

Build vs buy 

One thing that’s becoming clear is that the delivery of AI technology will be simple and transparent; you won’t think of it as AI, just an integral and intuitive part of your user experience and workflow.   

This is why, in many cases, AI solutions adopted by enterprises in the short term will come as part of a larger infrastructure package delivered by a service provider or partner, not necessarily engineered and developed in house. This is in line with how enterprises have already approached the adoption of new technologies like the cloud.   

Since most of our interactions with AI will come as part of a familiar software-as-a-service experience, it stands to reason that the way we purchase AI will fall in the same model as many of these solutions do: through a service provider.  

Therefore, I predict that in 2024, the majority (more than half) of AI solution adoption will be done through a cloud IT services provider. Additionally, AI solutions adoption is going to catalyze a new wave of infrastructure modernization within enterprises. With these solutions in place and their value made clear, there will be no going back, and AI will crop up in all corners of the IT stack.