These days it seems like you can't open a newspaper (ok, web browser) without coming across an article on artificial intelligence. Well publicized breakthroughs like Google AlphaGo's unprecedented victories over human Go champions have heralded the promise of a new golden age for AI. Add to that the personification of personal assistants in Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa coupled with Salesforce's “resurrection” of Albert Einstein and the rampant proliferation of AI-related startups – and the AI buzz becomes more of a cacophonous clamor.

To put it mildly, this is confusing for businesses, who are trying to determine what is real and what is mere snake oil. Will AI achieve its transformational promise, or will it join the trash heap of over-hyped technologies?

Forrester believes AI will significantly disrupt the way organizations win, serve, and retain customers… eventually. To do this, it will take massive amounts of data to train artificially intelligent systems to perform their jobs well enough to replace their human counterparts.

AI is making its first inroads in organizations on both the business and technology sides of the house.  Customer insights (CI) pros are using AI technologies and solutions to improve customer understanding and to optimize customer interactions at scale. Application development and delivery (AD&D) pros are leveraging AI technologies to transform business processes and build applications that augment human capabilities.  Forrester has identified and assessed the most promising AI-related technologies for each role.  Based on our rigorous TechRadar research methodology, we have determined the maturity of each category and predicted their future success.  The result is two separate TechRadar reports – one for CI pros and one for AD&D pros – to help inform important AI-related investment decisions.

Forrester's "TechRadar: Artificial Intelligence Technologies and Solutions, Q1 2017" identifies and assesses the twelve most important categories for CI pros in this nascent ecosystem. We have chosen to include both the technologies that serve as the key components of AI like text analytics and deep learning as well as fully baked AI solutions such as AI-embedded analytics solutions and pre-trained vertical solutions.

Forrester's "TechRadar: Artificial Intelligence Technologies, Q1 2017" identifies and assesses the thirteen most important categories for AD&D pros in this nascent ecosystem. In this report, we have highlighted the technology components AD&D pros will need to build internal- or external-facing AI systems.  As such, we’ve included technologies for developing conversational interfaces such as natural language generation as well as technologies for augmenting human capabilities such as robotic process automation.