Introduction
The level of smarts found in today’s state-of-the-art home electronics provides valuable insight into to the ADVANCEMENTS we can EXPECT from the consumer electronics industry and how aI will influence our daily lives in just a few years.
Artificial Intelligence was the hottest topic on display at Consumer Electronics Show in January 2020. The President of Bosch Electronics, one of the most advanced technology companies in the world, said in his CES 2020 keynote that AI will be a 125-billion-dollar industry within five years. Bosch is not the only company paying a great deal of attention to this space. AI is also expected to be the central focus this century for Samsung and LG, according to their presidential keynotes.
A similar investment in AI is starting to occur inside every corporate enterprise, and the rate of adoption to AI will be more rapid than what we we witnessed when companies shifted from being product-suppliers with IT departments to becoming full-fledged IT companies that also happened to manufacture products.
The transition to IT Infrastructure will become the most critical investment of a any enterprise, more so even than the products that a company produces, took approximately twenty years. For reference, ten years ago the largest financial investment companies in the world reported that they had more servers deployed across the globe than they had employees - with over 10,000 employees at the time. It’s my firm belief that competitive markets forces will drive companies across all industries to massively invest in AI, re-tool their IT architecture, hire (or retrain) an entirely new workforce. In just a few short years, these companies will be leverage more artificial intelligence than human intelligence. The rise of AI will surely be met with resistance, but the investment in AI will be absolutely essential for businesses to stay competitive.
The giants in the consumer electronic industry made it very clear at CES 2020 that consumers need to be willing to provide access to their data in order for these companies to turn a profit by providing AI-enabled technology . Thus, you will see their marketing message change from touting products that increase efficiency, like mowing the lawn faster, to products that make our lives “better”. These companies are betting that consumers will willingly share their private habits and daily routines so long as the technology they buy is supposed to make them healthier and happier; from what we should stock in our refrigerators to how we should brush our teeth.
So, what exactly is artificial intelligence? How smart is technology today, and how advanced will it get in just five years? To answer these questions, let’s start by examining one of the most sophisticated gadgets in the home, that performs a much more mundane task than its second-cousin Alexa: the humble vacuum cleaner.