Invest in Augmented Intelligence for digital transformation: Gartner analyst

New Delhi, Nov 16  Companies should focus on "Augmented Intelligence", digital product management, and in creating a digital twin of an organisation (DTO) for their next level of digital transformation and boost in growth, a top Gartner analyst has said.

Augmented Intelligence is the step beyond Artificial Intelligence (AI), where you marry AI with human capability, Partha Iyengar, Vice President and Gartner Fellow, told IANS in a telephonic interaction.

The concept refers to implementation of AI not just as a replacement of human work through automation, but as a means to augment their abilities.

"Augmented Intelligence could be applied across processes, across verticals and even across job functions," Iyengar said, adding that some organisations in India, including Indian Oil, have already started focusing on AI augmentation in a big way.

Globally, Singapore is at the forefront of implementing AI augmentation, according to Iyengar.

"They have created DTO where the organisation happens to be Singapore itself and there they are using Augmented Intelligence for a better future -- providing healthcare, emergency services, improved citizen services, etc."

With digital twins, organisations can simulate business processes and change things with the digital model first before supplying within enterprises, thereby helping them take better business decisions, Iyengar said.

Gartner predicts that by 2023, 50 per cent of major enterprises will use digital twins of the organisation in combination with digital business platforms.

According to a Gartner report, AI augmentation will generate $2.9 trillion in business value and recover 6.2 billion hours of worker productivity by 2021.

AI will create 2.3 million jobs in 2020, while eliminating 1.8 million, the report, titled "Predicts 2018: AI and the Future of Work", said.

Starting in 2020, AI-related job creation will cross into positive territory, reaching two million net-new jobs in 2025, it added.

"In general, technology adoption in India is keeping pace with global trends. Increasingly, business leaders are thinking that technology could be a strong determinant for growth of their organisations and we are seeing that happening in India as well," Iyengar said.

"The earlier separation that existed between business leaders and IT personnel are disappearing in Indian enterprises. That will accelerate technology adoption," he added.

Implementation of AI augmentation could be all pervasive in India in three to five years, he said. But there are still a few barriers to technology-adoption in India, the biggest among which is culture, Iyengar added.

"The biggest obstacle is culture. The technology is the easier part, but adapting your enterprise culture to embrace and completely adopt the technology is the first barrier that we see," he added.

Finding people with the right skills is the second barrier to technology adoption, he said.

"The third is the danger of chasing technology for technology's sake. You need to have the organisation's readiness in place before implementing new technology. You need to have very specific business use-cases to which you want the technology to be applied," he added.

The silver lining, he added, was that Indian companies continue to have the highest technology budget in the world for the sixth year in a row.

"Technology budget is different from the IT budget. And even in IT budget, Indian companies lead the world," he added.

According to the findings of the "2019 Gartner CIO Agenda survey", the transformation toward digital business is supported by steady IT budget growth. Indian IT budgets are expected to grow by 3.9 per cent in 2019, which is less than the 7.4 percent growth rate of the previous year, showed the findings presented at the ongoing Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Panaji, Goa.

This slowing can be attributed to the larger macro-economic situation concerning slow economic growth, corporate earnings and market volatility, the study showed.

Despite the slowdown, Indian IT budget would still be higher than the global average. Globally, CIOs expect their IT budgets to grow by 2.9 per cent in 2019, the findings showed.