Opinions are my own! 

1- Machine Learning made easy, available in every editor tool without the need of being data scientist to develop ML Models and deep Programming Skills.

2- Serverless in Platform as a Service (PaaS) will be the star, overtaking “containers” especially in the world of Data & AI.

3- For 2021 the headline is “Data Democratization”. In the last couple of years, since the data is exploding, the focus was on Data Lake, a.k.a bringing the data in a common data store. Moving forward enterprises are now focus on organization of the data, providing a “common data model”, data governance, Role Based access (security) and consuming the data (Analytics, Machine Learning, Enterprise reporting) without the need to move the data out of the lake. Today, it is complete chaos, many companies use the terms of “Lakehouse”, “Datahub”, “DataBank”. These are different patterns/architecture. I simply call it Data Democratization an old concept but covers all these patterns.

4- AI is now mainstream! It is used at every level of our day-to-day life. First, Improving our applications, websites through noise reduction (AIOps). Second, a lot of focus on Natural Language Processing that will provide business outcomes to enterprises. Third, extracting data from unstructured document/pictures seamlessly to integrate with our structured data. The challenge for 2021 is how can we ensure AI is responsible and “unbiased.”

5- Real-Time availability will be necessary, IOT will be the star and containers will be the processing engine at the Edge behind these use cases!