As businesses of all sizes struggle with making actionable sense out of the masses of data generated by social media and other sources, they are finding that Big Data and artificial intelligence (AI) form a great team. Machine learning and AI are growing in relevance throughout the industry because of this acute need for data analysis. It’s not surprising that the Big Data market is expected to grow by over 500 percent to $9.4 billion by the end of the decade.

Here are a few trends affecting Big Data and AI data industry experts predict will happen in 2017. Use their insights when planning your tech organization’s activities over the next 12 months and beyond.

A Growing Need for Big Data Analytics

Applications dependant on AI thrive on good data to improve their machine learning routines. This places the onus on data analytics professionals able to feed these programs the right information to make them more effective. Monte Zweben, CEO of Splice Machine, explains this process.

“AI applications powered by machine learning depend on data to develop more predictive models. The more data, and even more importantly, more data that represents the concepts you need to learn, makes AI applications better,” said Zweben.  As an example, he described the medical scenario where: “the more electronic medical records a system sees that reflect dangerous sepsis events in hospitals, the better a system can predict them before they happen.”

Cloud-Based Big Data Services Abound

Hosting self-service Big Data repositories is a natural application for cloud-based providers. As such, more companies are offering products that make the organization and generation of large data stores a simple web-based process.

“Cloud implementations of big data are increasing in popularity as it drives down the entry cost for these technologies. For many, building a big data stack just isn’t cost-effective – particularly for startups – and works best when the majority of the data can be hosted on a single instance,” commented Michael Cavaretta, director of analytics infrastructure at Ford Motor Company.

Clean Data for Everyone

The growth of Big Data as an input for machine learning and AI applications has created an opportunity for businesses focused on data cleansing. This process checks the data for duplicates and formatting errors. Monte Zweben sums up why this is an important need: “Machine learning systems are only as good as the data they train on, and the secret is transforming raw operational data into learnable features.”

When you need additional insights from the constantly evolving IT world, talk to the experts at the MindFinders. As one of the DC area’s leading technology staffing agencies, we can help your organization achieve its greatest success to date. Schedule some time with us soon!

Written by Tim Booker, President and CEO of MindFinders, with over 20 years of industry experience.