The Artificial Intelligence Market is Growing Rapidly. Read This to Get Up to Speed.

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) market is on fire—the good-growth kind of fire, not the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 kind of fire. AI’s boom encompasses natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, voice recognition, and image processing. Enabled by mobile devices and cloud technology, some analysts predict the enterprise AI market alone will reach $31.5 billion by 2025. What companies are investing, and how are they spending their money?

Judging from all the movement in the AI space of late, the better question might be what companies aren’t investing. Google is in, of course, with a two-pronged approach: one part acquisition strategy, one part internal AI research team. Facebook is in, too—it’s Applied Machine Learning (APL) team runs 50 times more experiments daily than it did just one short year ago. Apple recently acquired the CA-startup Emotient, a company best known for using AI to detect emotion from facial expressions. Salesforce has opted in, too, creating a new research segment—Salesforce Research—to dive into AI possibilities and applications. There are more, of course: Etsy, IBM, HPE, Microsoft, SAP . . . while their approaches differ, they’re all on the move.

To stake claim to their own pieces of the AI market, many of these companies are turning to acquisitions. The most recent report from market intelligence company CB Insights revealed nearly 140 companies operating in the AI space have been acquired since 2011, and over 40 of those deals were made this year alone.

Is this season of AI acquisitions a good thing, or will it lead to too much consolidation of technology and power? How precisely are key players investing in the AI marketplace, and what can you expect to see moving forward?

On Futurum, our sister site, we’ve got the industry insight you need to answer these questions and more. Read: The Booming Artificial Intelligence Market: Who’s In? Everybody!

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