2019 is the year of the original Bladerunner; the setting for the Ridley Scott movie in which Harrison Ford pursues renegade androids, drives flying cars and skypes Rachel, a synthetic secretary embarrassed by her artificial intelligence. Released in 1982 when Casio digital watches pioneered fashion-tech, 2019 seemed fittingly distant for a futuristic dystopia of aging infrastructure and malevolent technology. But now that 2019 has arrived, how much of Philip K Dick’s original text, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep written in 1968, has come true?
The strongest connection between Bladerunner’s 2019 and today is artificial intelligence, and our attitudes towards it. In the film, AI mimics biology to the extent that we cannot tell the difference. Today, superficially, that line is being blurred. In November, China state-run Xinuha News agency launched an AI Anchor, able to learn from live videos. Yet AI remains constrained within the boundaries of software, and (at the time of writing) ultimately dependent on other man-made structures.
Next year, AI will increasingly inform digitization and smarten business. At Xero, we have already announced new machine learning features for small businesses including a more intuitive invoicing experience that uses machine learning to make it easier to invoice customers and speed up time to pay and Xero email-to-bills which will extract and automatically populate details from any email PDF bill into Xero. All these developments help business owners and their advisers to automate and increase profits as a result.
From fulfilling basic HR functions to informing investment decisions, expect 2019 to be the year when businesses start to consider AI as just another asset, much like they once did the fax machine. But aside from AI, what else will 2019 have in store for business?
Continue reading Damon Anderson's thoughts on 5G, AI, cloud-computing and much more.