Page - 29 - in Digital Entrepreneurship - Impact on Business and Society

2.4 Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence is oneof themostmysterious and fascinating technologies of our time.Manymightknowthe termAI;however, themajorityofpeoplewouldnot understandwhat exactlyAI refers to. For a definition, we look towards Copeland (2020),whodefinedAI as ‘the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings’. Copeland (2020) further expands on this by elaborating on the components that make up Table 1 Characteristics of artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of things (IoT) and virtual reality (VR) impacting businesses Digital technology Characteristics Artificial intelligence (AI) •The globalAI softwaremarket is expected to reach 126 billionUSD in2025and is forecasted toexperiencemassivegrowth in thecoming years (Liu 2020) •Artificial intelligencewill account for almost 70%of the global economic impact by 2030 (Rao andVerweij 2017) •Thirty-seven per cent of organisations have implemented some form ofAI, which is a 270% increase over the last four years (Stamford 2019) • It is estimated that in 2020, 9.6 billionUS dollars will be spent on intelligent process automation. In this context, AI is autonomous decision-making through a system or systems designed to simulate human thought processes (Liu 2020) • 51%ofmarketers are already usingAI, while 27%of them are planning to incorporate it within their digital marketing strategy (Leftronic 2019) Virtual reality (VR) •The global VRmarket is expected to reach 56.25 billionUSDby 2025 (Globenewswire 2020) • It is estimated that in 2025, 87.97 billionUSDwill be spent onVR (Mordorintelligence 2020) •Globally, there are over 171million users of VR in 2019 (Petrov 2019) •Globally, 18million standaloneVRdeviceswill be sold in 2022 (Petrov 2019) •Global standaloneVRdeviceswill grow16 times between2018 and 2022 (Petrov 2019) The Internet of things (IoT) •Global spending on the IoT is expected to reach 1.1 trillionUSDby 2023 (Liu 2020) •The global industrial IoTmarket is expected to reach 14.2 trillion USDby 2030 (Weber 2019) •There are expected to be 21.4 billion IoT devices in theworld by 2025 (Liu 2020) •Cellular IoT connections are expected to reach 3.5B in 2023, increasing at a CAGRof 30% (Columbus 2018) •Seventeenper cent of theglobal respondents identified the IoTas the top technology game-changer in driving business transformation (KPMG2018) 30 R. D. Hisrich andM. Soltanifar