There's an old axiom that the best businesses thrive during periods of uncertainty. No doubt, that will be tested to the limits as 2022 portends upheaval on a grand scale.Pandemic-related supply chain disruptions are affecting everything from production of cars and electronics to toys and toilet paper. At the same time, global food prices have jumped to their highest level in more than a decade as worker shortages, factory closures and high commodity prices shred plans at even the most sophisticated forecasting and logistics operations.
Last year, we asked some of our top experts at NVIDIA what 2021 would bring for the world of AI and accelerated computing. They predicted each would move from planning to production as businesses seek new avenues for product forecasting, supply chain management and scientific research.
Headlines over the course of the year proved them correct: To save Christmas, retailers Home Depot, Target and Walmart chartered their own cargo ships to deliver goods to their stores around the world. To speed time to market, BMW, Ericsson and other companies began using digital twin technologies to simulate real-world environments.
AI adoption isn't limited to big names. Indeed, a midyear 2021 PWC survey of more than 1,000 businesses across nine sectors including banking, health and energy found that 86 percent of them were poised to make AI a mainstream technology.
This year, we went back to our experts at NVIDIA and asked them where enterprises will focus their AI efforts as they parse big data and look for new revenue opportunities.
Here's what they had to say:
BRYAN CATANZARO
Vice President of Applied Deep Learning Research
Conversational AI: Last year, I predicted conversational AI will be used to make video games more immersive by allowing real-time interaction to flesh out character-driven approaches. This year, conversational AI is all work and no play.
Companies will race to deploy new conversational AI tools that allow us to work more efficiently and effectively using natural language processing. Speech synthesis is poised to become just as emotive and persuasive as the human voice in 2022, which will help industries like retail, banking and healthcare better understand and better serve their customers.
Know Your Customer: Moving beyond natural language processing, companies using both speech and text for interaction with other businesses and customers will employ AI as they move to understand the context or sentiment in what a person might be saying. Is the customer frustrated? Is your boss being sarcastic? The adoption of tools like OpenAI Github copilot, which helps programmers be more effective at their work, will accelerate.
SARAH TARIQ
Vice President of Automotive
Programmable Cars: The days of a car losing value once you drive it off the lot will soon be gone. We'll see more automakers moving to reinvent the driving experience by creating software-defined architectures with headroom to support new applications and services via automatic over-the-air updates. Vehicles will get better and safer over time.
De-Stressing the Commute: The move to a software-defined approach also will help remove the stress and hassle of everyday driving. AI assistants will serve as your personal concierge, enhancing the vehicle journey for a safer, more convenient and enjoyable experience. Vehicle occupants will have access to intelligent services that are always on, allowing them to use real-time conversational AI for recommendations, alerts, vehicle controls and more.
Designing for the Long Haul: Automakers will begin to invest heavily in the use of simulation and digital twins to validate more of the end-to-end stack, and in training of deep neural network models. AI and data analytics will help train and validate self-driving cars for a broad range of driving conditions, delivering everyday safety that's designed for the long haul.
REV LEBAREDIAN
Vice President of Simulation Technology, Omniverse Engineering
Emerging Standard for 3D: We'll see advancing 3D standards for describing virtual worlds. Building accurate and rich digital counterparts to everything in the real world is one of the grandest challenges in computer science. Developers, enterprises and individual users will contribute to foundational open standards - analogous to the early days of the internet and the web. Standards such as Universal Scene Description (USD) and glTF will rapidly evolve to meet the foundational needs of Web3 and digital twins.
Synthetic 3D Data for the Next Era of AI: The rate of innovation in AI has been accelerating for the better part of decade, but AI cannot advance without large amounts of high quality and diverse data. Today, data captured from the real world and labeled by humans is insufficient both in terms of quality and diversity to jump to the next level of artificial intelligence. In 2022, we will see an explosion in synthetic data generated from virtual worlds by physically accurate world simulators to train advanced neural networks.
Re-Imaging Industry Through Simulation: Many industries are starting to examine and adopt digital twins and virtual worlds, thanks to the potential for operational efficiencies and cost savings. Digital representations of everything we build in the real world must have a counterpart in the virtual world-airplanes, cars, factories, bridges, cities and even Earth itself. Applying high-fidelity simulations to digital twins allows us to experience, test and optimize complex designs well before we commit to building them in the real world.
KIMBERLY POWELL
Vice President & General Manager of Healthcare
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