"AI is in the new electricity" (Andrew Ng) and its worth billions because recent real world examples have made it's value proposition clear for companies. Whether you are in finance, education, healthcare, manufacturing or any industry, AI can be applied to a wide variety of problems such as new techniques in supply optimization to adapting and improving credit fraud identification to earlier disease diagnosis and individualized treatment.
There is a race to incorporate AI into products and services as users become more accustom to the increased unique experiences that these tools can offer. There is also a race to make AI and its related tools easier to understand and integrate. To overcome the need for PhDs and an army of data scientists, efforts are in progress to simplify and repurpose proven AI models. For example, retailers are using established computer vision models vs building them from scratch to visually search on product images.
Corporate priorities will highly influence the direction of AI research. We will explore the hype and the reality of AI's impact as well as how it is being democratized to meet growing demand.