Artificial Intelligence continues to be one of the fastest growing and most transformative technologies today. Here are some of the top trends in AI to watch for 2020 and the coming years:

1. AI-as-a-Service. More companies are offering AI-based services and platforms through cloud services. This makes AI more accessible to organizations of all sizes. Major tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all now offer AI-as-a-Service for vision, language, video and more.

2. Automation of Jobs. AI will significantly automate many routine jobs, especially those involving repetitive tasks. This includes jobs like cashiers, food preparation workers, and customer service representatives. AI will also transform many industries like transportation, healthcare, and finance. While automation will eliminate some jobs, it will also create new types of jobs.

3. Explainable AI. As AI starts making more complex and critical decisions, it’s important that we understand how those decisions are being made. Explainable AI aims to make artificial intelligence and machine learning models more transparent and understandable to humans. Regulations may require some level of explainability, especially for AI systems making sensitive decisions.

4. AI for Healthcare. AI has huge potential for improving healthcare. Applications include diagnosis of diseases, personalized medicine, robot-assisted surgery, virtual nursing assistants, and automated health monitoring. AI can help detect diseases more accurately and earlier, while reducing costs.

5. Advances in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Recent advances in NLP, particularly in areas like neural networks, deep learning and word embeddings, have allowed for more fluent and coherent natural language understanding by machines. Powerful language models can now achieve human-level performance on many NLP tasks. NLP will enable smarter virtual assistants, improved machine translation, better content understanding and more.

Those are some of the major trends in artificial intelligence that will shape our future over the next several years. The impact of AI on industries and jobs is likely to accelerate, as increasingly powerful AI technologies are deployed to solve complex real-world problems. While the future remains uncertain, one thing is clear: AI will significantly disrupt life and society as we know it.