Skip to main content

Cognitive Collaboration: People and Smart Tech Unite

Smart machine technologies learn on their own and can produce unanticipated results. That said, by working together, smart machines and people can make each other smarter -- and protect each other from their inherent weaknesses.

Smart machines will enter mainstream adoption by 2021, with 30 percent adoption by large companies, according to the latest worldwide market study by Gartner.

New and evolving technologies such as cognitive computing, artificial intelligence (AI), intelligent automation, machine learning and deep learning are all considered to be part of the smart machines ecosystem.

Smart Machine Market Development

"The use of smart machines by enterprises can be transformative and disruptive. Smart machines will profoundly change the way work is done and how value is created. From dynamic pricing models and fraud detection, to predictive policing and robotics, smart machines have broad applicability in all industries," said Susan Tan, research vice president at Gartner.

For professional service providers, smart machines represent opportunities to help enterprises assess, select, implement, change and adapt talent. They can also help transform IT and business processes, in order to successfully adopt smart machines for commercial benefits.

The opportunity for consulting and system integration (C&SI) services will range from advising enterprises to help them with strategic design, training of the smart machines, deployment and integration to expansion and ongoing refinement.

These opportunities will help drive ongoing spending on smart machine C&SI services from $451 million in 2016 to nearly $29 billion in 2021.

Gartner analysts believe that the spectrum of sub-technologies within smart machines will be adopted at different speeds and timings, with the majority of smart technologies being mainstream adopted in the 2020 through 2025 time frame.

Outlook for Cognitive Consulting Services

According to the Gartner assessment, the anticipated enterprise investments into smart machines will span more than a decade, implying that the smart machine C&SI service market will be a long-term one.

"Over time, the increased C&SI opportunity created by the growing number of companies implementing more complex smart machine programs is expected to be counter-balanced by the a reduction in costs of adoption, as every subsequent adoption of the same smart machine solution will be less expensive and faster," said Ms. Tan.

In the long term (that's about 10 years), smart machines will be an integral set of tools in the toolkit of C&SI service providers and infused into all next-generation services offerings.

Popular posts from this blog

Enterprise AI Coding Agents Gain Momentum

What started as a convenience tool for developers writing faster software boilerplate code has evolved into something considerably more consequential: an autonomous layer of software engineering capability that is beginning to restructure how organizations design, build, and govern technology at scale. Gartner's latest market study and analysis of this market makes one thing clear. This is no longer a story about productivity enhancement at the margins. It is a story about competitive realignment at the platform level, with trillion-dollar implications for the vendors who supply these tools and the enterprises deciding which ones to trust with their core development infrastructure. AI Coding Agents Market Development The scale of the market alone signals how far this category has matured. Enterprise AI coding agents are now capturing a growing share of enterprise software engineering spend, with the market estimated at roughly $9.8 billion to $11 billion annualized as of April 2026...