AI Future Outlook Articles and Reports

This is a contributed article by Luigi Congedo, and edited by Emerj. Luigi is Venture Capital Principal at San Francisco-based BootstrapLabs, an AI-focused VC firm. To inquire about contributed articles from outside experts, contact [email protected].

Consultants and professional services leaders face one of the hardest times in business in the last century.
Sales are drying up, companies are pulling back budgets, millions are jobless, and the business world scrambles to find some solid ground for a “new normal.”
For consultants whose livelihoods depend on closing deals, delivering value, and maintaining lucrative contracts, the economic conditions alone make things challenging.
But the economy is one of two great threats.
The second challenge for consultants doubles as an opportunity: Technology priorities are changing quickly.
At Emerj Artificial Intelligence Research, we’re fortunate to have a finger on the pulse of enterprise priorities in real time. Our research connections, our renowned AI podcast (closing in quickly on 3 million total downloads), and our enterprise client list allow us to gather intelligence fast. At no time has that been more important than during the coronavirus crisis.
Through polls of hundreds of enterprise leaders, in-depth interviews with directors of strategy and innovation at some of the world’s largest companies, and conversation with countless startup leaders, the new priority is clear:
Efficiencies.
It goes by many names: “Getting lean”, “streamlining operations”, and above all else - “automation.”
The era of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be ushered in by sheer necessity, and enterprises know it.
Consultants with experience in specific IT domains or traditional means of “digital transformation” will find clients with entirely new demands and questions, and the vast majority of consultants will lose out.
Our research has lead us to two requirements that the COVID-19 era consultant must have:

This article is based on a presentation given by Emerj CEO Daniel Faggella in Geneva, at the 2019 New Shape Forum: Weapons Governance for the Geneva Disarmament Platform. To learn more about Emerj's AI presentations and speaking, visit our presentations page.

This article was written and contributed by Thomas A. Campbell, Ph.D. and Jon Fetzer of FutureGrasp, and was edited and published by the Emerj team.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, the United States is currently battling a mental health epidemic. One in every five Americans struggles with mental illness in one form or another. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, opioid abuse claims about 115 American lives every day. According to the Center for Workplace Mental Health founded by the American Psychiatric Association, up to 7% of full-time workers in the U.S. suffer from major depressive disorder, the economic cost of which is estimated to be $210.5 billion per year.

We've reached the sixth and final installment of the AI FutureScape series. In this article, we discuss what our survey participants said when asked about the role of business and government leaders in ensuring that AI steers us to a better future, not a worse one.

This article is the fifth installment in the AI FutureScape series, and in it, we discuss what our survey participants said when asked about the role international organizations like the UN should play in hedging against the risk of AI.

In the fourth installment of the FutureScape series, we discuss what our survey participants said when asked whether or not humans will play a role in the world once we reach the singularity.