Ignore the doom and gloom, artificial intelligence (AI) will become a positive job motivator. Moreover, 2020 will be a pivotal year in AI-related employment dynamics, according to the latest worldwide market study by Gartner.

The number of jobs affected by AI will vary by industry. Through 2019, healthcare, the public sector and education will see continuously growing job demand, while manufacturing will be negatively impacted. Starting in 2020, AI-related job creation will cross into positive territory, reaching two million net-new jobs in 2025.

Artificial intelligence market development

"Many significant innovations in the past have been associated with a transition period of temporary job loss, followed by recovery, then business transformation and AI will likely follow this route," said Svetlana Sicular, research vice president at Gartner.

AI will improve the productivity of many jobs, eliminating millions of middle- and low-level positions, but also creating millions more new positions of highly skilled, management and even the entry-level and low-skilled variety.

Unfortunately, most calamitous warnings of job losses confuse AI with automation, that overshadows the greatest benefit from the technology — AI augmentation — which is a combination of human and artificial intelligence, where both can complement each other.

IT leaders should not only focus on the projected net increase of jobs. With each investment in AI-enabled technologies, they must take into consideration what jobs will be lost, what jobs will be created, and how it will transform the way workers collaborate with others, and make decisions.

"Now is the time to really impact your long-term AI direction," said Ms. Sicular. "For the greatest value, focus on augmenting people with AI. Enrich people's jobs, re-imagine old tasks and create new industries. Transform your culture to make it rapidly adaptable to AI-related opportunities or threats."

Gartner identified additional predictions for AI:

• AI has already been applied to highly repeatable tasks where large quantities of observations and decisions can be analyzed for patterns.
• However, applying AI to less-routine work that is more varied due to lower repeatability will soon start yielding superior benefits.
• AI applied to non-routine work is more likely to assist humans than replace them as combinations of humans and machines will perform more effectively than either human experts or AI-driven machines working alone will.
• By 2022, one in five workers engaged in mostly non-routine tasks will rely on AI to do a job.
• Through 2022, multi-channel retailer efforts to replace sales associates through AI will prove unsuccessful, although cashier and operational jobs will be disrupted.
• In 2021, AI augmentation will generate $2.9 trillion in business value and recover 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity.

"AI can take on repetitive and mundane tasks, freeing up humans for other activities, but the symbiosis of humans with AI will be more nuanced and will require reinvestment and reinvention instead of simply automating existing practices," said Mike Rollings, research vice president at Gartner.

Rather than have a machine replicating the steps that a human performs to reach a particular judgment, the entire decision process can be refactored to use the relative strengths and weaknesses of both machine and human to maximize value generation and redistribute decision making to increase agility.

Editor's note: Read more about artificial intelligence on our sister publication, AI News.

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Just a few years ago, not many predicted cloud computing would reach the heights we’ve seen in 2017 – 79 percent of companies now run workloads in the cloud (split almost evenly between public and private clouds). With the cloud bar constantly being raised, where do we go from here? Here are five predictions for the future of cloud computing in 2018.

True hybrid clouds emerge

Hybrid cloud is all the buzz. The ability for enterprises to have applications run in different infrastructures – public and private clouds and on-premise with common orchestration and management tools – is enticing. Multi-cloud, with different workloads running in different clouds and being managed separately, will become the dominant mode in 2018, while true hybrid clouds will start to emerge.

There are already key technology developments and partnerships forming to make this a reality. For example, Azure and Azure Stack from Microsoft provide a uniform set of infrastructure and API capabilities across public and private clouds; the partnership between VMware and AWS; and the teaming up of Cisco and Google. These mashups will create hybrid clouds that truly blend environments and further improve operational agility, efficiency and scale.

Kubernetes dominates container orchestration

The fight for container orchestration dominance has been one of the cloud’s main events for roughly the past two years. The three-way battle between Docker Swarm, Kubernetes and Mesos has been fierce.

Come 2018, however, Kubernetes is poised to take the container orchestration title belt and also become increasingly mainstream with mission critical, scalable production deployments. Its rich set of contributors, rapid development of capabilities and support across many disparate platforms make it a clear victor.

And it has the help of some very powerful friends: Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud have launched a managed Kubernetes services. IBM has announced its private cloud will support Kubernetes in its Bluemix public cloud; AWS is lining up behind it as well and has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) as a platinum member

All this combined pushes Kubernetes into more mainstream deployments with continued growth in large production workloads next year.

Analytics get an AI upgrade

AI is everywhere. It’s in our homes with Amazon Echo. And in 2018, it’ll be embedded more tightly in IT analytics systems making IT proactive versus reactive.

Through predictive analytics, IT and application owners will receive actionable information and recommendations. Add to that the ability to automate their response, and the power of AI becomes more relevant.

Analytics systems will have insight into the behaviour of the infrastructure, apps and clients. It will recognise anomalous performance or security behaviour and when an app or server is going to fail. Once that behaviour is noticed, automation can kick in to remediate the potential problem, i.e. firing up another server or load balancing the app. It’s like your infrastructure can say “Alexa, spin up another server.”

Serverless computing adoption spreads

One of the benefits of cloud is ease of use for spinning up additional resources and its pay by use consumption model. Nowhere is that more evident than in serverless computing. Previously, the unit for additional compute resource was an instance or VM. Now a “function” has become an even smaller unit of “use.” Putting the onus of managing and scaling up resources on demand on the cloud provider is cost-efficient and takes the heavy lifting off IT. And paying based on a consumption model makes it gentler on already strained budgets.

Currently available in the public cloud, next year will see serverless computing start to appear in private cloud deployments as well. While it won’t become mainstream, wider adoption will happen in the short term.

Serverless computing, coupled with the continue maturation of cloud, puts pressure on server and hardware vendors to transform their business models to maintain relevance in the new virtual, elastic and automated cloud-powered world.

Custom cloud instances proliferate

As cloud adoption grows, compute instance types will become further segmented and optimised for specific use cases; enabling improved performance and new use cases. Next year will see growth in the number of application-specific instance types within clouds – from big data and AI-optimised instances to high network performance and very large memory types. Custom optimised applications that take advantage of these capabilities will start appearing.

Bonus prediction: Kiss cloud security concerns goodbye

Security is noticeably absent from our list of cloud predictions. Why? Simple. It’s time to move on.

Yes, security is always important, and even more so in the cloud. But it’s no longer the hindrance it was when cloud was early stages. Over the years, cloud and services available on the cloud have matured. There is more security built in. More tools are available from vendors. Compliance in the cloud has caught up. As with all IT, it’s imperative to think about security capabilities, policies and governance when deploying clouds or making a major change to your infrastructure, but in 2018 cloud will no longer be considered not secure by default.

In the cloud world, things move swiftly. That’s just a snapshot of what we think will be the major trends of 2018. There will certainly be more big headlines in cloud as more people find innovative ways to consume it.

(c)iStock.com/MarkRubens

The upcoming holiday season certainly seems to have brought some festive cloudy cheer in one corner of the world, with two Australian cloud and data centre companies being acquired by Oracle and Equinix respectively.

Aconex, a Melbourne-based cloud software provider which aims to manage teams in the construction industry, has been bought by Oracle for $1.2 billion US (£899m) to create ‘the world’s most comprehensive cloud offering for managing all aspects of construction projects’, as Oracle puts it.

The Redwood giant already has offerings in this space under the umbrella of the Oracle Construction and Engineering Cloud. Oracle acquired Primavera, a project portfolio management (PPM) software provider, in 2008, with the company’s applications being used in a wide range of industries, including construction, while added to this mix last year was Textura, acquired by Oracle for $663m.

Leigh Jasper, Aconex founder and CEO, said the Aconex and Oracle businesses were ‘a great, natural fit and highly complementary in terms of vision, product, people and geography.’ “With the addition of Aconex, we significantly advance our vision of offering the most comprehensive cloud-based project management solution for this $14 trillion industry,” said Mike Sicilia, SVP and GM of Oracle’s construction and engineering global business unit.

A bit further up, in Sydney, data centre provider Metronode is to be acquired by Equinix for $1.035 billion AUD (£594m). The company has 10 data centres in seven locations across Australia, from Adelaide, to Brisbane, Canberra and Illawarra, with two in Perth, Melbourne and Sydney.

Equinix already has a presence in the latter two, with the company saying the acquisition will ‘further strengthen the leadership position of Equinix in the Asia-Pacific region and support its ongoing global expansion.’ The deal will bring the total number of global Equinix sites to 52 across five continents.

“With this acquisition, companies operating across Australia will have access to the largest network of highly interconnected data centres in the world,” said David Yuile, Metronode CEO. “Metronode is excited to become part of an industry-leading company and further help our customers to build their digital infrastructure and drive competitive advantage in the digital age.”

According to the most recent study from the Asia Cloud Computing Association (ACCA), Australia dropped a place to be the fourth most cloud ready Asia Pacific nation. The country scored well in terms of privacy, broadband connectivity, freedom of information and intellectual property protection, but struggled in terms of international connectivity. Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and New Zealand had overtaken Australia for data centre risk.

Both deals are expected to close in the first half of 2018. You can find out more about the Oracle/Aconex deal here and the Equinix/Metronode acquisition here.

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