We believe that AI technologies are going to have a significant impact on many aspects of traditional enterprise software, SaaS applications, and consumer oriented applications (such as social media and apps) over the next five years. Outside of pure-play AI start-up ventures and BI/analytics companies, most software companies are still in the relatively early stages of assessing and evaluating areas of their businesses that could potentially exploit these technologies.
At this point in time, the construction and deployment of a new AI application, whether internal custom-built to a specific organization or within an enterprise software company product portfolio, faces numerous technical and implementation hurdles, many of which have not been dealt with before. Similar to Data Warehouse/BI/analytics and more recent Big Data projects, assembling, preparing and ingesting massive disparate data sets to be used in an AI project absorbs a significant amount of the overall time and resources of a project.
