The artificial intelligence industry is projected to grow to $14.2 billion by 2023, up from $525 million in 2015, according to a report cited in the source material. That represents a compound annual growth rate of 17.2 percent over the period.
Natural language processing is expected to be a major contributor to that expansion. The technology, which can handle customer service transactions and answer common questions in place of human employees, is being adopted rapidly, particularly by financial institutions.
North America is expected to hold the majority of the AI industry's market share by 2023, according to the report. Europe and the Asia-Pacific region are also projected to see significant growth, attributed to rapid urbanization in some areas, increasing smartphone use, and robust automotive sectors.
Automation's Workforce Impact
The source material also cites World Economic Forum data indicating automated systems are on track to replace more than five million workers by 2020. In the U.S., some predictions put job losses from automation at 7 percent by 2025, and a recent study found as many as 10 million jobs in Great Britain could be displaced over the next 10 years.
Whether AI and automation will create enough new jobs to offset those losses remains unresolved. The source notes that such an outcome is not likely to happen organically and would require societal changes, such as adjusting academic curricula to reflect the types of jobs students may hold a decade from now, or implementing universal basic income to ensure basic needs are met after job displacement.
The source material does not name the report's author, publisher, or methodology, and the specific predictions cited are attributed generally to unnamed sources or prior studies. The figures and projections should be understood as claims from the cited material rather than independently verified data.
Editorial Notes