Rapid growth, consumer adoption and what can we expect from AI in 2018?

There are an unprecedented number of start-ups poised to launch new products in 2018 and the year is likely to see more innovation than any time in the recent past, especially in the field of AI.

The hype around AI is at a peak, five of the world’s most valuable companies -Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft- are repositioning to become AI-First organizations. While the last ten years have been about building a world that is mobile first, “in the next ten years we will shift to a world that is AI-first.” (Sundar Pichai, Google).

With all this innovation on the horizon, we facilitated a discussion and gathered a crowd of over 100 guests at Google Campus to discuss the most promising applications of AI in 2018. Read about the first half of the event here.

So what can be expected from AI this year?

AI will see more rapid growth

Until recently, the AI market has been better characterized not by rapid growth but by incremental change. As Darko Matovski pointed out during our panel “If you look at the underlying algorithms, it’s still pretty much what Alan Turing designed in 1947.” Could 2018 be the year we start to see more innovation and breakthroughs?

“AI development has been so rapid that there are still bugs being worked out. For example, HP’s facial recognition technology that didn’t recognize Asian faces at first and needed to be trained. We will see many of these issues being worked out, as well as overall growth in the industry. Hopefully we will see AI being used for good and not just for profit in the near future.” Helene Guillaume

“Until now, the companies that have been the most groundbreaking have been the big companies like of course, Google. It makes sense, as they have the best data and computing resources.” Guillaume Bouchard

“There are over 700 AI startups in Europe and more than 1200 in the US who are at seed stage. These companies have been developing their products for the past 18 to 24 months. We expect many to hit the market in the next year with the biggest impact in the industries traditionally not associated with AI. For example, agriculture is one area that you might not think of when you hear the term AI, but developments are happening. Likewise, B to B applications of AI are vastly under-explored up until today” — Marie Outtier

Adoption is set to takeoff

AI adoption among consumers is poised to accelerate in 2018 as companies continue to embed AI functionality such as image recognition, pattern extraction and machine learning into their products.

“We are seeing the application of AI being put to use finally. AI has existed for quite a while, but only now are we starting to see solutions that useful in everyday life. For example, voice recognition with 90% accuracy is really annoying to use. But all of the sudden 95% is a lot better and the consumer adoption can really start to take off.” Darko Matovski

“Today AI is still not widely used. People still don’t know what AI is, but they know there’s a lot of potential.” Helene Guillaume

Indeed, consumer adoption is already taking off — Google recently reported that they have sold one Google Home per second since launching it a few weeks ago.

Personal health, complex data and common sense — Placing bets for 2018

Finally, we asked our four industry experts to place bets on the biggest breakthroughs that can be expected in 2018. Here are their votes:

“AI for personal health. Obviously I might be a little biased. But as humans we have so much data available to us in regards to health, our own bodies and science, so augmenting that with AI is going to be ground breaking for our everyday lives.” Helene Guillaume

“I would like to see an AI that can learn common sense. Why do we want something that knows everything in the world, but without common sense? One area where this will be critical is with robotics being developed for inside houses. It needs to know what a banana is and it needs to know if a banana is rotten and that if it is rotten it should be thrown away.” Guillaume Bouchard

“Size of datasets will become less important as we develop technology that allows us to get to a solution quicker, with less data points. For example, we need to feed millions of pictures of dogs for an algorithm to say with 95% accuracy that it is an image is a dog. But it only takes a few seconds for a 6 year old to do the same. So AI as an industry is pushing itself hard to be able to arrive at these answers faster, and it is starting to get better and better.” — Marie Outtier

“I agree with the focus on data. There is so much data in the world and the everyday person is not equipped to handle all of it. But hopefully machine learning and AI is soon going to make this data accessible with just a few clicks of a button so everyone can arrive at the answers they need faster.” Darko Matovski

We are ready to see what 2018 brings to the table, are you? Let us know your thoughts!