At Google’s developer conference this week, the company promoted its “AI first” future with a slew of artificial intelligence developments. These included a “Lens” feature for its Assistant app that identifies what’s in front of your camera and machine learning to keep video calls from cutting out when there’s a poor signal.
Google parent company Alphabet has made the most AI acquisitions
It’s the new intelligence.
Rani Molla was a senior correspondent at Vox and has been focusing her reporting on the future of work. She has covered business and technology for more than a decade — often in charts — including at Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal.
Artificial intelligence is a booming field, with revenue up 59 percent in 2017 to $12.5 billion, according to International Data Corporation forecasts. IDC expects the AI market to surpass $46 billion in sales in 2020.
That means Google parent company Alphabet is far from the only one making big bets on AI. Venture capital firms, including Y Combinator, Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, have all made numerous investments in AI startups, according to historical data from market research firm Quid.
Among corporations, Intel has made the highest number of unique investments in AI companies at 81. Telefónica, SoftBank and Qualcomm, among others, have also been omnipresent investors.
Alphabet however has had the most AI acquisitions, followed by Microsoft, Apple, Intel and Salesforce, according to Quid.
AI also includes an area known as “enterprise insights” where software is used to forecast consumer behavior. It is consistently the most popular area for AI investment. This year, InsideSales.com, an enterprise insights AI sales growth platform, received $50 million from investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Microsoft.
Virtual assistants and retail product recommendations are also popular areas for AI investment. Here are the areas within AI that have seen the most investment over time:
Focus areas of AI with most investments
Rank | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Enterprise Insights | Enterprise Insights | Enterprise Insights | Enterprise Insights | Enterprise Insights |
| 2 | Retail Product Recommendations | NLP / Sentiment Analysis | Retail Product Recommendations | Virtual Assistant | Solutions for Financial Institutions |
| 3 | NLP / Sentiment Analysis | Retail Product Recommendations | NLP / Sentiment Analysis | Retail Product Recommendations | Retail Product Recommendations |
| 4 | Virtual Assistant | Virtual Assistant | Virtual Assistant | Solutions for Financial Institutions | Virtual Assistant |
| 5 | Marketing Analytics | Marketing Analytics | Marketing Analytics | Drug Discovery & Medical Diagnostics | Marketing Analytics |
| 6 | Computer Vision | Computer Vision | Drug Discovery & Medical Diagnostics | Biometrics & Facial Recognition Security | Medical Dictation |
| 7 | Drug Discovery & Medical Diagnostics | Solutions for Financial Institutions | Solutions for Financial Institutions | NLP / Sentiment Analysis | AR/VR |
| 8 | Medical Dictation | Medical Dictation | AR/VR | Computer Vision | Drug Discovery & Medical Diagnostics |
| 9 | AR/VR | AR/VR | Computer Vision | Robotics & Autonomous Systems | Biometrics & Facial Recognition Security |
| 10 | Biometrics & Facial Recognition Security | Cybersecurity | Cybersecurity | AR/VR | Computer Vision |
Source: Quid
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
