The evolving AI marketplace: from startups to the giants

Nathan Benaich | Playfair Capital

Outline of today’s session

@nathanbenaich

1. AI: what we’re talking about and how best to use it

2. Today’s marketplace for AI-driven software products

3. How is the ecosystem changing?

4. Discussion with the founders of Ravelin, Gluru and Seldon

A suite of technologies enabling machines to perform complex tasks by observing, understanding and learning from data, automatically.

Three steps to intelligence:- Narrow: crafted for a specific task in a single domain (e.g. classification).- General: learning models that are flexible to multiple tasks and domains.- Superintelligence: recapitulate and outperform human cognitive abilities.

AI: what are we talking about here?

@nathanbenaich

Choosing the right approach for the task at hand1. What’s the task? regression classification clustering text/image/video/speech processing + understanding

2. Which technology to use?Computer vision, natural language processing, machine learning, deep learning...

3. Training approach depends on data: (un)supervised or reinforcement learning

4. Deployment: open source, SaaS, public or private cloud, on-premise

@nathanbenaich

A growing list of enterprise use casesRetail

financeFraud

preventionNetwork security

Hardware

Sales & marketing

Data analytics Text analysis

Many more to come!

@nathanbenaich

Not a week goes by without AI making the news

+150% YoY

@nathanbenaich

Source: CB Insights

From the big boys: AI has to be a core competency

“ML is a core, transformative way by which we’re rethinking

how we’re doing everything.”

Sundar Pichai, Google

“We need to make AI be so completely part of our

engineering fabric that you take it for granted.”

Joaquin Candela, Facebook

@nathanbenaich

$300m

And they’re paying up to win the race: $2.5bn in 18 months

$250m

~$55m

$350m

@nathanbenaich

$680m

$800m

Software as a service and open sourcing picks up a pace

@nathanbenaich

+250% YoY

Everyone’s doing it...

@nathanbenaich

Procuring software from startups: where to look?

Data providers Investors Accelerators Online

communities

Events

@nathanbenaich

A powerful last resort...

Let’s discuss!

@nathanbenaich