Building an operating system for data is the foundation needed for any industry today. These could range from a health care organization crafting a strategy to comply with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) policies, to an airline using artificial intelligence (AI) to pinpoint maintenance issues sooner and get passengers to their destinations on time.

As we move further into the new year, companies may need to harness greater amounts of their data for competition and innovation. This will not only help to solve the challenges surrounding dark data and upcoming data regulations but will also open the door to uncovering new ways to innovate with data and AI. As more organizations take hold of their data with cloud technology, we can expect these five trends to continue to change the way we view the potential of cloud and AI in 2018.

Data Preparation Will Shift To Support Data Science And Fuel AI

Previously, data scientists worked by the 80/20 rule, with 80% of their days spent finding and preparing data and just 20% on actual data analysis. Thanks to advancements over the last year in cloud-powered data cataloging and data refining, this equation has been flipped. By using technologies that can automatically ingest, classify and organize all of a company’s data sources, data scientists can now spend more time creating and exploring new models and projects with ready-to-go data sets instead of spending long hours priming them manually first.

The AI edge of companies that adopt these tools over this next year will significantly accelerate. Just as a well-prepared kitchen stocked with ingredients is critical to a successful restaurant, the rapid availability of primed data will be key to building competitive products. We should expect to see more technologies that streamline the cleansing and ingestion process to come to market, further feeding the scope and speed of AI development.

More Data, More Ways To Tap Into Higher-Value Services

We’ve seen the rapid adoption of cloud in industries such as retail, manufacturing and insurance — and according to the Economist, over 90% of enterprises report using the cloud as part of their business. Companies see the increased efficiency and innovation potential that a solid cloud data platform offers, and now they’re beginning to tap into the data science and AI opportunities that the cloud unlocks.

2018 will be the year we see AI and data science, powered by the cloud, make their way further into a wide range of wildly different industries.