The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on the Future of Forecasting

ikOOba Technologies

Forecasting and reality are totally two different driving elements in our lives. Forecasting is not accurate and it will never be accurate. Forecasting is wrong. I know this might be shocking, but it is the truth. So, one might ask why companies forecast future trends? Well, forecasting can be reliable but not accurate. Reliability here means a forecast that is free from errors, human biases and the information being used for forecasting should be relevant.

Nowadays, forecasting is an input for a production department as well as for a sales department. Forecasters use different forecasting software applications like GMDH Streamline, RStudio, IPython, JustEnough, Manugistics or just Excel. Collecting, cleaning, transforming and analyzing data to generate a forecast model is the fundamental job of a forecaster on a daily basis. With today's global technology, artificial intelligence (AI) will develop new ways to perform gathering data to coming up with the best possible forecast model in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. It is just a matter of time until AI exterminates many jobs and forecasting can be one of them. Some of us might not like it and some might, however, it is inevitable.

Forecasting-related human skills will fall as AI starts to perform prediction cheaper, faster and more reliable. The future of forecasting will change in a way that improve our lives, for example, I recently saw Tesla new self-driving car that actually predicts human behaviors while it is going really fast on a road. The environment in which the car was driving was uncontrolled that means it is very difficult for that car to predict the unlimited number of scenarios that can occur and still it did.

Historically speaking, technologies in general have created far more jobs than they have eliminated. Forecasting can be done in the future easier than now and what can really help is the application of Machine Learning (part of AI) because one can train and test big data without involving much work. What lies ahead is positive and if you are truly in love with forecasting, like me, then we are the ones who should bring about the change that will make a substantial impact in the forecasting industry.

Sources:

- Future Ready book

- https://hbr.org/2016/11/the-simple-economics-of-machine-intelligence?utm_campaign=hbr&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social