How Top MNC Companies Use Artificial Intelligence In Practice
All the world’s tech giants from Alibaba to Amazon are in a race to become the world’s leaders in artificial intelligence (AI). These companies are AI trailblazers and embrace AI to provide next-level products and services. Here are 10 of the best examples of how these companies are using artificial intelligence in practice.
The 5 Best Examples Of How Companies Use Artificial Intelligence In Practice
1. Alphabet — Google
Alphabet is Google’s parent company. Waymo, the company’s self-driving technology division, began as a project at Google. Today, Waymo wants to bring self-driving technology to the world not only to move people around but to reduce the number of crashes. Its autonomous vehicles are currently shuttling riders around California in self-driving taxis. Right now, the company can’t charge fare and a human driver still sits behind the wheel during the pilot program. Google signaled its commitment to deep learning when it acquired DeepMind. Not only did the system learn how to play 49 different Atari games, but the AlphaGo program was also the first to beat a professional player at the game of Go. Another AI innovation from Google is Google Duplex. Using natural language processing, an AI voice interface can make phone calls and schedule appointments on your behalf. Learn even more about how Google is incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning into operations.
Artificial intelligence (AI)’s importance in business is set to increase in 2020 with Google stepping up its focus on the technology after a decade filled with activity.
With more than 1 billion users, Google is one of the world’s biggest brands, and arguably the biggest key driver of modern technological advancement — only recently, Google announced their ‘Quantum Supremacy’ breakthrough, in which their quantum computer managed to solve a mathematical calculation in 3 minutes and 20 seconds — something that supercomputers are unable to complete in under 10,000 years.
The past decade alone has seen huge leaps in Google’s capabilities and focus on AI, with the arrival of Google Assistant in 2016 and the Neural Matching algorithm introduced in 2018, to deliver more diverse search results by analyzing language on a deeper level than previous algorithms. For the first time, Google could match words to concepts and figure out what a user wanted from a looser search.
Google’s commitment only looks set to grow, with the company’s co-founder, Larry Page, taking a particularly close interest in AI, revealing that: “Google will fulfill its mission only when its search engine is AI-complete.”
Google is definitely, absolutely committed to AI. Larry Page is committed, and it is viable in both short-term, by being able to out-analyze competition, and the long-term, the consequences of being the first creator of anything resembling true AI is vast.
“AI is no different from the climate,” Pichai said. “You can’t get safety by having one country or a set of countries working on it. You need a global framework.”
— Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google
2. Amazon
Not only is Amazon in the artificial intelligence game with its digital voice assistant, Alexa, but artificial intelligence is also part of many aspects of its business. Another innovative way Amazon uses artificial intelligence is to ship things to you before you even think about buying it. They collect a lot of data about each person’s buying habits and have such confidence in how the data they collect helps them recommend items to its customers and now predict what they need even before they need it by using predictive analytics. In a time when many brick-and-mortar stores are struggling to figure out how to stay relevant, America’s largest e-tailer offers a new convenience store concept called Amazon Go. Unlike other stores, there is no checkout required. The stores have artificial intelligence technology that tracks what items you pick up and then automatically charges you for those items through the Amazon Go app on your phone. Since there is no checkout, you bring your own bags to fill up with items, and there are cameras watching your every move to identify every item you put in your bag to ultimately charge you for it.
How AI transformed Amazon into an eCommerce powerhouse
Amazon is an eCommerce powerhouse. In 2019, the giant retailer is expected to hit a 52% market share in the US and almost 14% worldwide.
From predicting how many customers might buy a new product to running Amazon Go, the cashier-less grocery store to assessing the quality of fruits and vegetables without smelling them for Amazon Fresh because humans are too slow and inconsistent.
Amazon’s AI capabilities allow the platform to provide customized recommendations. According to the latest reports, Amazon’s recommendation engine drives 35% of total sales.
With more than 100 million Alexa devices having been sold, Amazon’s smart speaker maintains a 70% market share in the US. In a statement in the last quarter of fiscal 2018, Jeff Bezos said Echo Dot was the best-selling item across all products on Amazon globally, and customers purchased millions of more devices from the Echo family compared to last year (source).
In 2018, Amazon developers improved Alexa’s ability to understand requests and answer questions by more than 20% through advances in machine learning. Also, the number of research scientists working on Alexa has more than doubled in the past year, Bezos noted.
The giant American e-commerce retailer builds everything on AI because AI solves shoppers’ problems which in turn supports Amazon’s customer-centric approach.
“Autonomous weapons are ‘genuinely scary,’ robots won’t put us all out of work.”
— Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon
3. Apple
Apple, one of the world’s largest technology companies, selling consumer electronics such as iPhones and Apple Watches, as well as computer software and online services. Apple uses artificial intelligence and machine learning in products like the iPhone, where it enables the FaceID feature, or in products like the AirPods, Apple Watch, or HomePod smart speakers, where it enables the smart assistant Siri. Apple is also growing its service offering and is using AI to recommend songs on Apple Music, help you find your photo in the iCloud, or navigate to your next meeting using Maps.
Unfortunately for Apple, it doesn’t seem like all this spending has resulted in an AI platform that dominates the market. According to the Voice Platform Impact Ranking, which factors in both consumer adoption and ecosystem support, Siri has fallen behind the competition. On a scale of -250 to 250, Alexa currently scores at 110.2 and Google scores at 97.3, while Siri sits at a mere 38.3 in front of Samsung’s Bixby.
So far, the Siri ecosystem has failed to expand beyond the iOS operating system. Meanwhile, Google Home and Amazon Echo devices feature robust support from any third parties. It would seem that money spent doesn’t necessarily equal long term growth or success, but Apple continues to make acquisitions in 2020.
“We can achieve both great artificial intelligence and great privacy standards. It’s not only a possibility, it is a responsibility. In the pursuit of artificial intelligence, we should not sacrifice humanity, creativity, and ingenuity that define our human intelligence.”
— Tim Cook, CEO of Apple
4. Facebook
One of the primary ways Facebook uses artificial intelligence and deep learning is to add structure to its unstructured data. They use DeepText, a text understanding engine, to automatically understand and interpret the content and emotional sentiment of the thousands of posts (in multiple languages) that its users publish every second. With DeepFace, the social media giant can automatically identify you in a photo that is shared on its platform. In fact, this technology is so good, it’s better at facial recognition than humans. The company also uses artificial intelligence to automatically catch and remove images that are posted on its site as revenge porn.
The social media giant along with its subsidiaries like Instagram and WhatsApp, has the biggest user-base in the country, with millions of users subscribing to its apps presently. Facebook, in the last few years, has strengthened its presence in the country with initiatives like the India Innovation Program, where it has tied-up with T-Hub to mentor startups that are capable of solving problems that are unique to India. Announcing the commencement of its second edition, Facebook stated that this year’s theme will focus on artificial intelligence, where startups working on the technology will be picked by the company.
It then stated the startups chosen for the cohort will focus on solving societal problems in the areas of Women and Girl Empowerment, Agriculture, Healthcare, Education, Climate Change, Resilient Cities, etc.
“With the second edition of the India Innovation Accelerator program, we want to help to build the ecosystem for AI in India and support startups with the resources and opportunities,” Satyajeet Singh, Head of Platform Partnerships, Facebook India and South Asia, said in a press statement.
Apart from the exclusive cohort program, in March, Facebook concluded its AI for India summit, where the social media platform discussed its AI strategy for India. At the sidelines of the summit, it announced that 100 scholarships will be awarded to students and developers to nurture their ideas for utilizing AI for social good, training through Facebook Hubs and exclusive AI hackathons for women will be organized to increase development in the field of AI and ML.
“I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, I’d probably say that. So we need to be very careful.“
— Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook
5. Microsoft
Artificial intelligence is a term that appears on Microsoft’s vision statement, which illustrates the company’s focus on having smart machines central to everything they do. They are incorporating intelligent capabilities to all its products and services, including Cortana, Skype, Bing, and Office 365, and are one of the world’s biggest AI as a Service (AIaaS) vendors.
Microsoft, one of the most valuable companies on this planet, is heavily focusing on AI as the go-to technology for their future success. In the following blog post, we will try to unpack
- whether the claim “bringing ai to everyone” can and should be taken literally, and
- what the strategic considerations behind the positioning towards AI are.
“We want to pursue democratizing AI just like we pursued information at your fingertips”
— Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft
we already gave an overview of the various cloud platforms claiming the topic of intelligent automation and process integration for themselves. After the first wave of digitization, where the focus was primarily on data storage, access options, and communication, the key technological component now is machine learning, which naturally benefits greatly from the enormous data volumes and immediate availability in the cloud and has made considerable progress in recent years.
In 2014, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced the cloud-first strategy for the company to prevent another missed entry as seen before in the mobile business. Furthermore, the aim was to transform the company from an outdated single software license business for operating systems and productivity applications towards SaaS business models. Since then, market capitalization has roughly quadrupled within 6 years, making Microsoft one of the most valuable companies in the world. After Amazon Web Service, Microsoft’s own cloud platform Azure is the second-largest cloud provider with well-known partners and clients that contributed almost one-third of total sales in 2019 with around US$ 39 billion.
SUMMARY
The market for artificial intelligence has exploded over the last decade. While platforms such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Google’s Assistant, and Microsoft’s Cortana have dominated the market, these companies have not been the source of that growth. Instead, stiff competition between the biggest corporations has led to aggressive acquisitions of AI startups.
According to data compiled by CB Insights, there have been a total of 635 artificial intelligence acquisitions between 2010 and September 2019. Those purchases also increased six times over from 2013 to 2018, with 166 acquisitions in 2018 alone — a 38 percent increase year over year. For companies like Apple, Google, and the rest, these purchases can almost always be linked back to a new product or feature.
Leading the charge is Apple, with 20 acquisitions since the 2010 purchase of Siri. As an example, the tech giant acquired Novauris Technologies and Voysis to improve speech recognition of its voice assistant platform. Apple has also bought companies including Perceptio and RealFace to develop its Apple ID technology.
Google follows with 14 acquisitions in the same time period, though it once led all tech companies in artificial intelligence acquisitions, between 2012 and 2016. Google grabbed DeepMind Technologies to develop applications for artificial intelligence. It also acquired companies including Api.ai and Superpod to strengthen Google Assistant’s capabilities.
Microsoft has bought 10 startups, Facebook has acquired eight, and Amazon purchased seven in total. Of the 489 companies to buy an AI startup over the last decade, 431 of them purchased only one company. That means these tech giants — and Apple, specifically — are dominating this AI arms race.
CONCLUSION
In business management, the trend is becoming more customer-centric, personalized, and data-driven. As technology continues to progress, current practices will continue to evolve. In the end, it is about creating real customer value. No matter how businesses achieve that, being open and adaptive to change is one step closer to staying competitive and relevant in the face of new challenges, whether brought by humans or technology.
Most business leaders expect significant changes from AI in the next five years. But according to AI industry experts, the more dramatic effects of AI may occur within 10 to 20 years. That means that just about any company today needs a plan with respect to AI — it’s up to you to decide which technology will keep you competitive. Keep yourself informed, choose a strong platform, and watch your business reap the benefits.
These amazing videos will inspire you to learn Artificial Intelligence and Robotics.
How can we make a robot that is truly artificially intelligent?
Note: They are not VFX, They are Real.
Must Watch !!
(5) Video: Horror Short Film “Slaughterbots” | ALTER !!!
(6) Video: Chappie: Switching Human’s Consciousness to Robot.
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
(5)
(6)
Thank you !!
Like | Share | Comment
