AI Everywhere
AI (Artificial intelligence) is everywhere. No longer the stuff of science fiction, AI is rapidly gaining traction in widely divergent fields with explosive growth in investments and startups. AI-enabled tools alone will generate $2.9 trillion in business value by 2021. 80% of enterprises are investing in AI. Spending will grow by more than 50% year over year through 2020.
While at Turner, I helped launch TV Everywhere & we promoted it as TV ‘Anytime, Anywhere’, yet AI truly does seem to be ubiquitous. A quick scan of the news reveals:
Medical – Studies have revealed that AI is faster, more accurate than humans at analyzing heart scans
Retail – Walmart plans to use robots to audit their stores.
Gaming – EA is teaching AI troops to play ‘Battlefield 1’ to enable neural network training and machine learning to create more human-like bots of the future.
Marketing – Adobe launched Sensei to leverage AI for research. To better understand how people consume media and marketing via voice-enabled devices, Adobe later added voice analytics. 79% think AI will allow marketers to move toward more strategic work
Sales – Salesforce introduced its AI platform Einstein for CRM.
Customer Service – 80% of marketing execs said they already used chatbots or planned to use them by 2020.
Content Moderation – YouTube is using AI to moderate videos
Automotive – self-driving cars have been in the news lately because of an accidental death, but experts are already warning of hackers who can such cars as weapons
War Fighting – AI could revolutionize warfare as much as nuclear weapons;
Legal Research – AI is better at reading than humans are.
Voice Assistants – Alexa and Siri are now household names and have started replacing actions most recently taken on mobile phones. IBM Watson wants to bring this capability to its enterprise partners.
With all of this hype and investment, Gartner’s Hype Cycle tool is invaluable in assessing AI’s impact. Gartner Hype Cycles provide a graphic representation of the maturity and adoption of technologies, and how they are potentially relevant to solving real business problems. AI is at a critical juncture in Gartner’s hype cycle. AI technologies are circling the “peak of inflated expectations” and have, essentially, passed the “innovation trigger” stage (consumers and companies alike see the potential.) Next, AI is headed for the “trough of disillusionment,” where the hype dies down and reality sets in.
Experts say AI could create the richest companies ever. Of the Frightful Five, Amazon is the most aggressive in acquiring AI companies, while Microsoft and Google may be sitting on the most data.
