AI Founders and Executives Predict 5-Year Trends on Consumer Tech

AI investments have become more and more prevalent over the last 5 years, and articles in the Financial Times, TechCrunch, WIRED, and elsewhere tout an era of heightened interest in machine learning and artificial intelligence-oriented companies.

The year 2015 might be seen as the year that "artificial intelligence risk" or "artificial intelligence danger" went mainstream (or close to it). With the founding of Elon Musk's Open AI and The Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence; the increased attention on the Future of Life Institute and Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute; and a flurry of attention around celebrity comments around AI dangers (including the now well-known statements of Bill Gates and Elon Musk), it's safe to say that the risks of AI has embedded itself as a topic of pop-culture discourse — even if it's not a very serious one amongst the populace at present.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning adoption among different industries represents a new chapter in digital transformation. However, according our own research across industries, AI adoption in 2017 remains low with majority of major success stories coming only from the largest tech players in the industry (Google, Baidu, Apple, etc). McKinsey Global Institute estimates that in 2016, tech giants invested $20-30 billion into AI, while smaller companies altogether invested an estimated $6-9 billion.

The last few years have yielded a tremendous amount of attention at the intersection of AI and healthcare, from DeepMind's partnership with the UK's National Health Service to IBM's continued pushes into areas of genomics and drug discovery. From the perspective of healthcare executives, however, many important questions are left unanswered and rarely addressed in detail:
What difference are healthcare's machine learning innovations likely to make in the lives of patients?
What disruptions should healthcare executives prepare themselves for now?
How will the healthcare industry operate differently in 5 or 10 years into the future?
We surveyed over 50 executives of healthcare companies leveraging AI. We aimed to do the hard work of separating the companies actually applying AI from those who use it as a buzzword (over 15 of our initial survey responses were turned down due to lack of evidence of real AI in use), presenting important predictions and industry insights in clear and interactive charts and graphs.
The following research article is broken down into five sections:

Back at the beginning of the year, I set out to get a feel for a city in the longitudinal center of the country, between two coastal tech hubs in San Francisco and NYC: Austin. I wanted to find out what made Austin an attractive AI and tech hub the way I had in Boston, Atlanta, Montreal, and Bangalore before it. It turns out the AI startup community in Austin is measurably different than those on the east and west coast, and it stood out to me in the way it was able to offer a quality of life that's rare for fresh-out-of-college talent on the coasts.