Artificial Intelligence (AI) is poised to reshape how businesses (and humans) do everything - from the manner in which they understand and analyze users' behavior to how they deliver better experiences that can more deeply engage audiences - and that is really just the tip of the digital iceberg in terms of what is possible with such technology.
AI is generating a great deal of interest for good reason, of course, and not just from enterprises looking to take advantage of the opportunity these solutions provide. According to CB Insights, more than 30 artificial intelligence companies were acquired in the first quarter of 2017, indicating an immense amount of interest in the ability to improve experiences and optimize operations.
Interest and investment, of course, does not mean utilization. Adgorithms released a study in Feb. 2017 that revealed AI adoption by marketers is actually quite limited and may simply be too complicated at this point in time to take advantage of. This is illustrated well by responses from 40 percent of those surveyed who indicated they thought they had already adopted AI-driven marketing, reflecting a belief that existing targeting capabilities and automation meant that AI was already operating behind the scenes. Clearly some work needs to be done.
Despite the confusion and a rather slow rate of adoption among marketers, many leading technology companies including IBM, Intel, Salesforce, Amazon and others, are working feverishly to capitalize on the trend and investing heavily in artificial intelligence to get ahead of the curve and their competition. Google, for example, announced in early July that the UK Press Association was awarded a grant to run an automated new service (a project dubbed Radar) with support from an AI startup called Urbs Media that will create thousands of news stories for hundreds of local papers.
In many ways, the technology industry is only now beginning to realize the possibilities of AI. Let's take a look at a few artificial intelligence solutions that will likely benefit businesses like yours in the very near future:
DeepAI: An AI solution that makes it possible for developers to use very advanced image and video recognition in their applications. Developers using the technology can label objects in an image or video, generate an image caption, as well as label customers' age, gender and cultural appearance. It's been used by companies such as Yahoo to detect nudity and NSFW (not safe for work) elements in images.
Banjo: A solution that makes use of artificial intelligence to analyze social media content and identify important real-time events and situations. The AI technology startup was developed after the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013 as a way to analyze social media in order to make better decisions, move faster, and change the way people understand and interact with others around the world.
Agent.ai: An AI software (shown on the right) that leverages several customer and agent-facing artificial intelligence-based features that have been designed to improve customer engagement, retention, and expedite the time it takes for customers to get resolutions to their questions and requests.
Sisense: A business intelligence software that enables users to prepare, analyze and visualize data. The end-to-end solution is used by numerous companies including eBay and NASA to handle data sets from multiple sources, providing an opportunity to crunch terabytes of data and support multiple users on a single server.
ViSenze: An artificial intelligence technology that recommends visually similar items when users are shopping online. ViSenze utilizes machine learning and computer vision algorithms, which process and analyze millions of visual content. It uses visual sensing to find a match for an item online, then offers filters for pricing, similarity and availability.
More AI News: Computational Video Editing
Researchers from Stanford and Adobe have recently developed an artificial intelligence program that partially automates the video editing process (the dialogue in particular) without totally eliminating creative control. The solution reportedly organizes the footage (all of the different "takes" and camera angles) and essentially matches them up to available lines of dialogue by using facial recognition and emotion recognition as well as other computational imaging effects in order to determine what works best in each frame.