Guest editorial

There are emerging trends and impacts due to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics and blockchain as described as follows. AI-driven applications are rapidly increasing for businesses and governments globally, and they enable different functions of services to work efficiently and allow multi-tasking. Reporting outcomes can be further assisted by data analytics, which present scientific and business outputs in graphs and visualization based on the extraction and analysis of complex datasets (Keim et al., 2008; Chang, 2018a, b). Behind the development of data analytics, smart algorithms can quickly and efficiently process large data and extract the most meaningful data to report to decision-makers (Chang et al., 2019). The use of blockchain can enhance security, privacy and optimization of the entire services since blockchain offers secure application development with smart contracts and its distributed Fintech technology (Alketbi et al., 2018; Kaur et al., 2018; Zeng, 2018). Integration of AI, data analytics and blockchain can be essential for the new development of pioneering research (Mamoshina et al., 2018; Zeng, 2018). For example, in driverless cars, their integration makes impacts so that we can predict drivers' intents (Birek et al., 2018). In another example, the integration can enable multi-disciplinary research in healthcare, finance, weather studies and natural disasters (Chang, 2018b).
In other words, the integration of AI, data analytics and blockchain can produce greater impacts and availability of different services, such as 5G, Internet of things (IoT), Cloud, Fintech, cybersecurity and software engineering (Skilton and Hovsepian, 2017; Gai et al., 2018; Mohamed and Ali, 2018; Chang et al., 2019b; Saha, 2019). The integrated services have emerged to tackle large-scale standalone IT facilities for improving computational efficiency and reducing cost. This also transforms the way software engineering has been developed since service-oriented architecture can offer a framework for service components, a natural attribute of distributed ledger services to make more impacts offered by AI, data analytics, blockchain and its integrated uses.