Some of the other concerns for Responsible AI are related to compliance, privacy, and bias. According to Gartner, addressing the trustworthiness of AI is the overall top challenge in AI today. As industrial leaders dedicate themselves to this purpose, they will take on the specific challenges it entails. In order for Responsible AI to make this journey, for example, it needs to become a top priority on an industrial scale. It relies on pairing new adopters with the ones who got onboard early. This means making platforms that are scalable, safe, and ceaselessly reusable. One of the overarching topics in AI this year is the industrialization of platforms that use it. The biggest overall megatrends in 2020? Industrialization of AI platforms and democratization of AI. (A better push for more responsible technology, anyone?) Indeed, Responsible AI is one of five new categories on the chart this year, along with Small Data, Composite AI, Generative AI, and the intriguing Things as Customers.

Responsible AI is pretty new to the curve, projected to reach productivity in 5 to 10 years, whereas most of the other AI subfields are likely to get there in 2 to 5 years. Here’s Gartner’s assessment of where AI topics and categories are at right now. In the end, the new product or service becomes a part of life, settling at pretty moderate expectations from those who’ve followed it through its cycle. But if leaders stick with it, they will slowly start to gain enlightenment and bring public interest back up. Without enough motivation and foresight, an idea could die here. After people realize the challenges that will inevitably come with making the idea happen, they fall into a trough of disillusionment. The hype quickly builds, based on novelty and and idealistic dreaming.

Once a new innovation is thought up, people get excited about it. While its graph almost looks like something your third grader made on her field trip to the postmodern art museum, it does make a lot of sense when you take a closer look. It charts the course of different categories of technologies (see our post on the Hype Cycle for Cloud Security as well). The Hype Cycle is a process that Gartner envisions a technology innovation going through over time.

Gartner hype cycle ai