AI Sector Overviews Articles and Reports

In virtual worlds, AIs are getting smarter. The earliest instance of artificial intelligence in games was in 1952, when a lone graduate student in the UK created a rules-based AI that could play a perfect game of tic-tac-toe. Today, teams of researchers are working on—or have already succeeded in—creating AIs that can defeat humans in increasingly complex games.

Executives worry about their businesses.

They often have to navigate, with limited resources, a stormy market made of customers, competitors, and regulators, and the interactions between all these actors make finding answers to business questions a complex process.

In 1895, the German physicist, Wilhelm Röntgen, showed his wife Anna an X-ray of her hand. “I have seen my death,” she said. Medical imaging broke paradigms when it first began more than 100 years ago, and deep learning medical applications that have evolved over the past few years seem poised to once again take us beyond our current reality and open up new possibilities in the field.

With the development of free, open-source machine learning and artificial intelligence tools like Google’s TensorFlow and sci-kit learn, as well as “ML-as-a-service” products like Google’s Cloud Prediction API and Microsoft’s Azure Machine Learning platform, it’s never been easier for companies of all sizes to harness the power of data. But machine learning is such a vast, complex field. Where do you start learning how to use it in your business?

Investments in artificial intelligence continued on an upward swing in 2016, following through on the technology's promise to disrupt how business is done across industries.

Since Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Kik, Slack, and a growing number of bot-creation platforms came online, developers have been churning out chatbots across industries, with Facebook's most recent bot count at over 33,000. At a CRM technologies conference in 2011, Gartner predicted that 85 percent of customer engagement would be fielded without human intervention. Though a seeming natural fit for retail and purchasing-related decisions, it doesn't appear that chatbot technology will play favorites in the coming few years, with uses cases being promoted in finance, human resources, and even legal services.

While there have been and continue to be innovative and significant machine learning applications in healthcare, the industry has been slower to come to and embrace the big data movement than other industries. But a snail's pace hasn't kept the data from mounting, and the underlying value in the data now available to health care providers and related service providers is a veritable goldmine. In this editorial, we provide an overview of where healthcare's big data actually comes from, and why providing robust data analytics services in this sector matters.

Predictive analytics for marketing would have been adopted years ago - if only the compute power were more ubiquitous, the data were more accessible, and the software were easier to use. Now "predictive analytics" itself is almost a buzzword, after nearly 30 years of backward-looking marketing tracking.
Today, well over 30 years after the founding of Lotus Software, even medium-sized businesses are often still operating their marketing "scoreboards" in Google Sheets or One Drive... "throw it in a spreadsheet" still works.
But businesses with an eye on the future want to know more than just what happened in the past. "Scoreboards" (most analytics tools and tracking) don't tell you what the score will be. Some of our recent "AI for marketing" articles have gained readership because more and more executives are searching for ways to look forward with their numbers, not just back. SAS defines the term well: