Billions in AI: The Statistics of Current Global Investment Trends

The AI winter is over today, and this can be clear from the recent statistic
investigations in the field of investments that shows that the rise of companies’ contributions to AI has reached about 69% in 2017. This report was given by PwC global — a professional audit company that is a part of the big four auditors like EY, KPMG, and Deloitte. The company has conducted a study, in which the rise of the AI sphere and the demand for it in the global market is clearly seen.

The other research and analytical data provided by the PwC company showed that the overall volume of investments comprised about $2 B in the first three months of 2018. If to compare this data with 2017 indexes, the growth is more than 50%. Such countries as China and USA are leaders among AI investors. More than $20 B have been contributed to companies implementing neural networks in their projects for the last year in the United States of America only.

It is projected that by 2030, the potential contribution to the global economy influenced by AI startups will rich $15.7 T. This is about 26% growth of the overall market income. There is nothing surprising in it if to imagine use cases AI can easily cover and problems this technology can solve. Ever more financial studies predict the coming revolution of AI companies in the future.

In fact, the application of Artificial Intelligence has almost no limits. Today’s leading companies and major incumbents like Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, and others are known to stake on neural networks’ development and its further implementation for their own commercial purposes.

Apparently, China is going to pick up the leading torch in the AI field by 2030, boosting its GDP up to 26% in the future. The second-place finisher in the smart hi-tech race will become North America with the GDP of 14.5% as PwC’s predictions show.
Still, at the present moment, the USA has a better AI environment, nevertheless, this trend will change.

According to Kai-Fu Lee, a leading investor in Chinese AI startups and former executive of such companies as Google, Apple, and Microsoft, Asia has many advantages to become a number-one country in AI soon:

“So, we’re not in the age of discovery; we’re in the age of implementation, we’re in the age of data, and China has a better set, a larger set of implementers or good AI engineers who get the work done, who make the algorithms run fast, connect to business logic.”

However, the AI wave has swept not only Asia and United States but also the entire world. Today we can name hundreds of “unicorn” companies based on the application of machine learning technologies. Afiniti, for instance, is a deep learning analytics and revenue optimization platform which has raised $80 M at the end of 2017. Its’ valuation now is $1.6 B. Benevolent.ai is another example of the extensiveness of the AI sphere of application. This project has received about $115 M of fundings. The Artificial Intelligence technologies of the company serve to boost the capacities of the healthcare and assist with the drug discovery.

There are also projects based on AI technologies in Russia. Our OLPORTAL project represents the entire ecosystem for neurobots’ creation, training, selling, and purchasing them powered by Hedera Hashgraph. Besides, this app provides the opportunity of earnings in chats. We plan to create more than 100 bots by the end of the development, and this number will be growing all the time. Up to this moment, we have already more than 170 000 downloads from Google Play and App Store and wish to reach the milestone of 5 M active users by the end of our fundraising campaign. OLPORTAL will contain marketplace with bots, messenger, crypto wallet, and advertising service in one app. They will be created for the better performance and proper existence of our neurobots in the system. The hard cap of the project is $18 that is quite a little sum in comparison with yearly investments in AI technologies worldwide. However, it is enough to produce a well-performing product with hybrid deep neural networks in it.

The AI revolution is happening right here and now. Ever more companies decide to add this technology to their products to leverage the capacity and performance of it.