In his fourth post in the series, Marshall Kirkpatrick focuses on the intersection between artificial intelligence and Mobile, and in the fifth he focuses on cloud. By way of reminder, Marshall launched a 30 day series that explores the intersection between AI and the various innovation components on my emerging futures visual.

As he has in each post, Marshall identifies the key subject matter experts that sit at the intersection of AI and the visual component in question. In the case of Mobile, the SMEs are: Kevin R Benedict, Bob Sutor, and Carlos Cuffi. The future scenarios identified are:

Real-time app explosion: mobile digital experiences personalized in real-time, contextually relevant, including mobile wallets and thousands of other capabilities

Ultra-AR: AI and mobile combine to make ultra-realistic Augmented Reality on consumer mobile handsets, becoming the new mixed-reality playground for marketers, artists, and others. This could get blurred with headsets, or they could remain distinct

Trains on Time: AI and Machine Learning on mobile lead to nothing but product recommendation engines, fraud detection, and predictions of customer churn

From a Cloud perspective, Marshall identifies these people to watch: Kirk Borne, Lillian Pierson, Tim Allen and Sandy Carter. The future scenarios identified through his analysis are:

AI-as-the-platform: Artificial intelligence as a service in the cloud could enable fundamental new capabilities for processing big data, and outshine all the other benefits of cloud computing, from cost savings to scale. It could become the next foundational platform for computing, as ubiquitous and full of surprises as mobile has been

Computer vision interfaces everywhere: With cloud-based speech, image, and video recognition, AI could enable new efficiencies in ubiquitous computing interfaces, in devices used for all kinds of things: from transportation to healthcare. Machine intelligence could become the new normal in consumer and business applications, creating the expectation that all the devices we interact with verbally or visually will understand us, our communication, and our surroundings as an everyday matter of fact

General intelligence cloud: Cloud-networked AI could hit general intelligence and quickly grow out of human control  – the science fiction scenario. Ray Kurzweil predicts that Artificial General Intelligence will be realized by 2030

At a macro level, Mobile and Cloud are components of the third IT platform as defined by IDC ( the blue components of the emerging futures visual below). Artificial Intelligence (cognitive systems) is one of several innovation accelerators that take the third IT platform to the third revolution general purpose technology platform as described by Jeremy Rifkin. The significance of this intersection analysis is that we are witnessing the birth of this general purpose technology platform via the convergence of the third IT platform with these innovation accelerators.

The other posts in the series on AI and intersections can be found via the links below:

• 3D Printing
• Food
• Fintech