The new year brings in renewed vigour and zeal for people in every industry. Moreover, for a subject as dynamic as Artificial Intelligence, there is always curiosity to get to know the future trend and trajectory of the field. While the growth in AI has almost always managed to outpace human expectations, Ravinder Singh of Juniper Networks has made an effort to predict the top five trends for 2022. Here are his predictions:

• AI assistants that can manage and troubleshoot networks on par with human domain experts will be promoted to a member of the IT team: In the enterprise, AI, machine learning and AIOps ultimately have the potential to become as trusted a source as the most experienced IT domain expert. While we’re not there yet, in the coming year we can expect AI assistants and conversational interfaces to take on a more serious and trusted role in the enterprise. At present, AI conversational interfaces can answer up to 70% of support tickets with the same effectiveness as a domain expert. As network complexity and distributed workloads increase, AIOps and virtual AI assistants will become viewed as an essential member of IT teams. Further, as cloud services continue to scale to provide unlimited, cost-effective processing and storage, both enterprises and technology providers will be empowered to adopt AI assistants across various support teams – feeding in the volume and quality of data necessary to train AI technologies to increase their accuracy.  
• As remote and hybrid work environments continue to be the norm, enterprise-grade networking and security will move into the home networking space: 2022 will further cement the home as a staple enterprise micro-branch driving enterprise IT teams to take an even sharper look at their network edge. To ensure end-to-end network visibility, reliability and security, we can expect enterprise-grade networking solutions to begin permeating remote and hybrid workforces. Many companies will take a hybrid approach, moving from legacy security solutions to a client-to-cloud Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) approach, moving their most high risk remote worker to SASE, an architecture that brings together networking and security, providing direct, secure access to applications as they move to the cloud.
• AI-driven assistants will largely take over the troubleshooting process in networks: They say video killed the radio star, and now artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP) and natural language understanding (NLU) are going to kill the “dashboard star.” The days of hunting and pecking or looking at charts will go to the wayside when you can literally just type in a question and get an answer, or have issues flagged for you and in some cases actually fixed on their own – known as self-driving. You're going to see a trend around AI-driven assistance replacing dashboards and changing the way we troubleshoot, essentially eliminating the “swivel chair” interface.
• Data center staff shortages will drive the need for automation: Recent reports have found 47% of companies with data centers couldn't find proper staffing to operate those data centers, and that's going to be a continued problem. In response, you're going to see more and more automation, whether it's automated fabric management, or intent-based networking, or automated assurance – You'll start to see this takeover more in the data center, whereas in the past, it was a bit more manual. 
• As COVID-19 continues to drive lower building occupancy mandates, indoor location will become a necessity to facility managers: Businesses of every size should prepare to invest in AI-driven data analytics and indoor location technology, including Bluetooth LE technologies (BLE). Formerly considered a “nice to have,” indoor location technology is now a must-have for nearly any business, from retailers to warehouses to large enterprises that need to understand exactly who is on their premises. Even as the world slowly begins to open and reduce mandates, the way in which facility managers consider indoor location has changed forever. 

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