The Artificial Intelligence (AI) market is on fire—the good-growth kind of fire, not the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 kind of fire. AI’s boom encompasses natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, voice recognition, and image processing. Enabled by mobile devices and cloud technology, some analysts predict the enterprise AI market alone will reach $31.5 billion by 2025. What companies are investing, and how are they spending their money?
Judging from all the movement in the AI space of late, the better question might be what companies aren’t investing. Google is in, of course, with a two-pronged approach: one part acquisition strategy, one part internal AI research team. Facebook is in, too—it’s Applied Machine Learning (APL) team runs 50 times more experiments daily than it did just one short year ago. Apple recently acquired the CA-startup Emotient, a company best known for using AI to detect emotion from facial expressions. Salesforce has opted in, too, creating a new research segment—Salesforce Research—to dive into AI possibilities and applications. There are more, of course: Etsy, IBM, HPE, Microsoft, SAP . . . while their approaches differ, they’re all on the move.
To stake claim to their own pieces of the AI market, many of these companies are turning to acquisitions. The most recent report from market intelligence company CB Insights revealed nearly 140 companies operating in the AI space have been acquired since 2011, and over 40 of those deals were made this year alone.
Is this season of AI acquisitions a good thing, or will it lead to too much consolidation of technology and power? How precisely are key players investing in the AI marketplace, and what can you expect to see moving forward?
On Futurum, our sister site, we’ve got the industry insight you need to answer these questions and more. Read: The Booming Artificial Intelligence Market: Who’s In? Everybody!
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Shelly Kramer is a Principal Analyst and Founding Partner at Futurum Research. A serial entrepreneur with a technology centric focus, she has worked alongside some of the world’s largest brands to embrace disruption and spur innovation, understand and address the realities of the connected customer, and help navigate the process of digital transformation. She brings 20 years' experience as a brand strategist to her work at Futurum, and has deep experience helping global companies with marketing challenges, GTM strategies, messaging development, and driving strategy and digital transformation for B2B brands across multiple verticals. Shelly's coverage areas include Collaboration/CX/SaaS, platforms, ESG, and Cybersecurity, as well as topics and trends related to the Future of Work, the transformation of the workplace and how people and technology are driving that transformation. A transplanted New Yorker, she has learned to love life in the Midwest, and has firsthand experience that some of the most innovative minds and most successful companies in the world also happen to live in “flyover country.”