Flickr/dee & tula monstah Companies worldwide will spend $3.5 trillion on IT in 2017 , market research firm Gartner predicts. Above all else, companies are expected to increase their spending on software and services (as opposed to hardware), as they all rush to buy their tech via the cloud computing model, where tech is hosted in the vendor’s data center and delivered as a service over the internet. Software spending is projected to be up 6 percent in 2016, and to grow another 7.2 percent in 2017 to a total of $357 billion. Meanwhile, companies will spend $943 billion on IT services, up nearly 5% over 2016 spending levels. All this means that there are billions of dollars at stake for the rising tech trends, things that emerged within that last few years are ready to take off and become mainstream next year. Gartner and other market research firms predict the following 9 trends will be the biggies in 2017: Matt Rosoff/Business Insider Artificial intelligence and machine learning became big buzzwords in 2016. Google and Microsoft added all kinds of AI services to their clouds. Salesforce rolled out a new AI-infused analytics service, and so on. Even startups started putting AI in their apps, too, like travel site Gogobot. "The more advanced techniques move beyond traditional rule-based algorithms to create systems that understand, learn, predict, adapt and potentially operate autonomously," Gartner says. Research firm Markets and Markets estimates that the AI market will grow from $420 million in 2014 to $5.05 billion by 2020. Microsoft While AI will infuse everything, from cloud services to Internet of Things, there’s one area that will really grow intelligent in 2017: virtual assistants. While Siri, Cortana and Google Now are not exactly new, such services are being stitched into more areas. For instance, […]
