In October 2015, Gartner revealed its analysis about Top Predictions for business and people for 2016 and beyond. The report offers a look into the digital future, where humans and machines, in the form of smart things, will need to define and develop harmonious relationships.

“The ‘robo’ trend, the emerging practicality of artificial intelligence, and the fact that enterprises and consumers are now embracing the advancement of these technologies is driving change,” said Daryl Plummer, managing vice president, chief of Research and chief Gartner Fellow.

Here are the Key Findings from the report:

• The relationships between machines and people are becoming increasingly competitive, as smart machines acquire capabilities to perform more and more daily activities.
• “Smartness” is now everywhere in the work environment through the extensive use of smart devices, smart software agents with consequences and potential risks like unauthorized economic transactions, psychological wedge between businesses and their employees, that make it difficult for enterprise decision-makers to foresee.
• The Nexus of Forces is evolving and expanding into an entirely new set of scenarios.

Since the predictions in the report are in line with our domain, we decided to prepare an infographic of selected key figures taken from the report, in the two most developing areas: Internet of Things (IoT) and Smart content.

What a dramatic shift! Apparently, businesses, enterprises and even governments must tailor their strategy to support the change! According to Gartner:

“The dramatic rise of smart machines and autonomous devices is driving radical shifts in business practices and individual behaviors.”

Here are the recommendations from Gartner:

• Evaluate emerging vendors to identify automated content generation services (for example, article writing or Web content generation) that your enterprise might want to use today.
• Review content management roadmaps to determine their ability to offer automated content production or integration into systems that generate natural language content.
• Consider content management vendors’ analytics capabilities, current or planned, and identify ways they might be useful for automated content generation.
• Evolve your marketing segmentation and targeting disciplines to handle many more microsegments.
• Improve your A/B and multivariate testing discipline to better define success for different prospect groups.
• Review current enterprise plans for new devices, wearables, scanners and attendants that might produce new data formats and metadata, and determine whether the information they produce could or should be leveraged for autogenerated business content.
• Conduct an exploration of jobs (or roles) that could be augmented with automatic content generation capabilities, and particularly when it can provide more value to customers.
• Cultivate a mind and process shift among creative team members and agencies toward more modular and template-based creativity rather than finished products.

Conclusion

The automated content generation and intelligent agents are a must for businesses to be successful in new digital era.

You can find the full Gartner report here (for registered users).