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Connected Tyres, Smart Space, and Self-Driving Bin Lorries — Testplant Predicts 2018 As the Year of IoT-as-a-Service

The hottest AI platform today will be a cold fish by the end of 2018. That’s according to Testplant’s technology predictions for the year ahead.

The digital automation intelligence company has compiled a list of Smart/IoT predictions, claiming that 2018 will be the year the common car tyre will become ‘connected’, with sensors embedded that can talk wirelessly to telemetry boxes and the cloud, acting as a source for big data analytics.

While IoT will fuel this new set of innovative services, Testplant warns that government needs to pay more attention to creating a whole new standard of IoT certification using a new AI-powered test technology in order to avoid a range of privacy and ethical dilemmas caused by physical objects merging into digital information infrastructure.

Testplant’s CTO Antony Edwards also called for standardisation and proper testing of algorithms and regulations, raising the issue of criminal negligence as AI algorithms out of our control have the potential to bring mass fatalities.

On a positive note, the predictions note the emergence of the first ‘Open Data’ communities, where AI and deep-learning drive the creation of communities where people share data repositories to help train algorithms.

In terms of the technology department, Testplant expects that software testing will move back in-house, as the productivity gains of automation and the need to have testing more aligned with user experience increase. For the IT department, HR and recruitment are set to become the most important internal departments, with the dramatic increase in demands for new skills in security, data science and in-house testing.

With regard to DevOps and security, Testplant also predicts that security testing will stop being an ad-hoc activity performed only by specialists; with every release project including some level of security testing. The company claims that 2018 is the year that the business itself will be pulled directly into DevOps, especially product owners who, under pressure to compete, will drive true change through continuous delivery.

2018 will be a huge year for IoT. “Tyre-as-a-service is just one example of many things we’ll see sold as a service as we’re able to track more usage through IoT. We will see more and more things sold as-a-service, because it’s so easy to track usage through IoT. Coffee-as-a-service, tyre-as-a-service, garbage collection-as-a-service. Maybe we’ll start seeing police-as-a-service, teachers-as-a-service. Perhaps it’s the start of no one having a fixed job and everyone and everything being like an uber or AirBnB. Either way, this will mean technology is driving business and no longer the other way around.” John Bates, CEO, Testplant

“AI is changing so quickly that AI platforms will quickly become obsolete as new technologies are discovered and quickly rolled out. So, teams need to focus on delivering short-term value applications using AI rather than building AI platforms.” Antony Edwards, CTO, Testplant

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by John Bates .