High time to get smart: Gartner

Bangalore: Smart machines will be the most disruptive change ever brought about by information technology. How people work with information will change, and we will rely on, and be aided by, smart machines", says Gartner's Vice President and distinguished analyst Partha Iyengar. "We will be able to spend more time being more productive on the job and have more time to pursue other things in life with some of the gains of productivity,”  he suggests.

In the second half of this decade, Gartner analysts expect to see dramatic growth in the availability, sale and use of smart machines. Gartner predicts that smart machines will have widespread and deep business impact through 2020.

Smart machines can make people more effective For example, physicians can stay up to date on tens of thousands of new scientific research papers published in their discipline every year while engaged, full time, in an advanced medical practice. Smart machines can also encroach on what people do, displacing them. There can be a long-term impact on truck driver employment of automated trucks that are already in commercial use on private property in limited numbers.

Some smart machines are little more than clever, brute force automation, as in semiautonomous vehicles such as self-driving cars or automated crash-avoidance braking systems that will autonomously apply the brakes when the car's systems detect an imminent threat to which the driver has not properly responded.

Other smart machines are genuinely smarter. They are built to exploit self-learning, machine learning and deep learning algorithms. They behave autonomously and adapt to their environment. They learn from results, create their own rules and seek or request additional data to test hypotheses. They are able to detect novel situations, often far more quickly and accurately than people. The criteria defining smart machines will continuously advance as well.

“We expect individuals will invest in, control and use their own smart machines to become more successful. Enterprises will similarly invest in smart machines,” adds  Iyengar. “Consumerization versus central control tensions will not abate in the era of smart-machine-driven disruption.

If anything, smart machines will strengthen the forces of consumerization after the first surge of enterprise buying commences.

Gartner research has found that many CEOs are failing to recognize the widespread and deep business impact that smart machines will have through 2020.The bottom line is that many CEOs are missing what could quickly develop to be the most significant technology shift of this decade.

Gartner believes that the capability and reliability of smart machines will dramatically increase through 2020 to the point where they will have a major impact on business and IT functions. The impact will be such that firms that have not begun to develop programs and policies for a "digital workforce" by 2015 will not perform in the top quartile for productivity and operating profit margin improvement in their industry by 2020. As a direct result, the careers of CIOs who do not begin to champion digital workforce initiatives with their peers in the C-suite by 2015 will be cut short by 2023.