AI Sector Overviews Articles and Reports

In the broad sweep of AI's current worldly ambitions, machine learning healthcare applications seem to top the list for funding and press in the last three years.

Machine learning has had fruitful applications in finance well before the advent of mobile banking apps, proficient chatbots, or search engines. Given the high volume, accurate historical records, and quantitative nature of the finance world, few industries are better suited for artificial intelligence. There are more uses cases of machine learning in finance than ever before, a trend perpetuated by more accessible computing power and more accessible machine learning tools (such as Google's Tensorflow).

In the hundreds of researcher and executive interviews we've been fortunate enough to conduct in the last three years, few artificial intelligence applications are brought up more than marketing and advertising. During talks with execs and researchers from companies ranging from Facebook to Baidu, and IBM to AT&T, marketing has been a perennial theme in conversations of AI's hottest applications.

Today's artificial intelligence market is not easy to quantify. Besides the lack of consensus on a coherent definition for "artificial intelligence" as a term, the field's nascent stage of development makes it difficult to carve out silos or hard barriers of where one industry or application ends, and another begins.

Wall Street, venture capitalists, technology executives - all have important reasons to understand the growth and opportunity in the artificial intelligence market, but the inherent vagueness of the term makes any single valuation extremely difficult. Indeed, the term "artificial intelligence" is notorious for having a relatively amorphous definition.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to fall into the general pit of buzzword-vagueness. Artificial intelligence (AI) often falls into the same trap, particularly with the advent of new terms such as "machine learning," "deep learning," "genetic algorithms," and more.