Many companies are still running legacy systems, systems that still work and that the companies have invested heavily in.
"But at a certain point, it collapses under its own weight," Rao says. "Either the business goes broke, or they decide to start over with a fresh infrastructure. And the cost of packing up and starting something brand new has been decreasing substantially. It's just a matter of time before they're forced to upgrade."
Is it all just hype?
With all the news reports recent advances in speech recognition, language translation, image processing, pattern recognition, and, of course, self-driving cars, many people are predicting an AI-powered cataclysm where humans become obsolete.
"People claim the world will be transformed overnight," says Rao. "I don't think that's happening. At the same time, it's not just all made-up vapor ware and will all just die down. It's somewhere in between."
Manual, repetitive, and routine tasks will be automated, he says. "And when all of those things are automated, you want to be in place where you can add value."
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