10 Artificial Intelligence (AI) Ideas that Will Shape the Future: Insights From 10 AI & ML Startups.
Given my background, I would start an AI company whose goal would be to teach computers how to read….
Those are the words of Microsoft founder Bill Gates in an interview with CNBC about what type of company he would start if he were to drop out of Havard today.
From voice recognition to self-driving cars, Artificial Intelligence is bound to transform the world in ways never imagined before. An AI-oriented world would not just build machines that handle our physical activities, but would also create systems and networks that think like us or think for us.
Whether AI helps us in our everyday lives, threatens our job security, decimate human competitors in Go and Poker, or threatens the existence of the human race, this disruptive technology is here to stay. Like the Internet, Artificial Intelligence has its own perils - but that doesn’t stop the world from leveraging the technology for great things.
The evidence that this technology is going to change the world is already everywhere. According to IDC, global spending on cognitive and AI systems will reach 77.6 Billion by 2022. With this, it is expected that AI will create a business value of about 3.9 trillion by 2022 according to Gartner.
Added to the high interest shown by tech giants such as IBM, Microsoft, Google, and many others, as well as the rise of startups in this space, some of the IA systems that will change the future are already born and others are yet to be created.
The big question is:
What are the AI ideas that will shape the world in the coming decades? Like the dot com boom, which AI ideas will become the Google and Microsofts of the future and which ones will become the AOL’s? Thus, if you were to start your own AI company today, which sector or idea should you focus on in order to stay relevant?
Since it’s not always easy to look into the future, especially with disruptive technologies, we’ve gathered views from AI startups and industry leaders to tell you what they think - about the next big ideas in this industry and why they matter.
1. Pharmaceuticals and Artificial Intelligence
The odds of turning a molecule into a drug are very slim. 9 out of 10 clinical drugs fail to reach trials and many more do not pass FDA approval after development. From research to drug design and processing, these are the ideas changing this industry.
AI-assisted scientific experiments to speed drugs to market
Dozens of companies now use AI to re-purpose drugs and generate novel drug compounds. But that's a small part of getting a drug to market. There's a huge burden of preclinical research that comes next. It involves a lot of trial and error and manual labor.
The result: about half of preclinical research spend is wasted, $28B a year is wasted in the US alone on preclinical research due to issues with experiments.
AI can solve this: for example, it can help scientists design more successful experiments. It can also automate some of those experiments. Everyone wins. Patients get faster, cheaper therapies and researchers get more time to make breakthrough discoveries.
BenchSci is the world leader in AI-assisted antibody selection. Unlike traditional antibody search tools, BenchSci uses proprietary machine learning, bioinformatics ontologies, image recognition technologies, filters, and a figure-centric interface to enable rapid selection of experiment-specific antibodies.
2. Healthcare AI
In high-income countries, AI is already being used in many ways to provide better healthcare, and bound to do more in resource-poor settings in the near future.
Artificial Intelligence is enabling the development of new ideas in health informatics, electronic medical records, and mobile health among others.
AI is expected to create about $150 Billion in saved healthcare cost annually by 2026 in the US alone (Accenture). The AI healthcare market itself is projected to be worth $6.6 billion by 2021, representing a compound annual growth rate of 40% since 2014.
Not to mention the fact that about 440,000 Americans die each year due to medical errors, which can be easily prevented by AI.
These are some of the disruptive AI ideas that will shape healthcare in the future.
Using AI for early detection and treatment of infant head malformations.
30% of newborns develop moderate to severe plagiocephaly, also known as flat head syndrome (FHS). This is becoming a pediatric epidemic in the USA. In addition to facial asymmetries and associated psychological pressure, FHS is correlated with developmental delays and other health conditions.
There is not ample time during well-visits to sufficiently educate parents about FHS. As a result, many infants with correctable deformities progress to need intensive and expensive therapies such as correctional helmet due to late diagnosis.
PediaMetrix is developing a mobile health solution called SofSpot that uses AI and quantitative image analysis to characterize the type and severity of FHS using photos of the infant’s head. It also offers infant-specific re-positioning instructions and follow-ups to ensure compliance. In the future, AI will do more work in early detection and treatment of infant head malformations.
Monitoring Brain Health with AI
The past decade has witnessed the evolution of deep learning and artificial intelligence algorithms that enhance clinicians' ability to care for their patients.
Within the medical community, this includes enhanced detection of abnormalities in medical image data, applications to predict disease progression in patients, as well as identification of new biomarkers for early detection of disease.
JuneBrain is excited to join this wave towards AI-assisted patient care. Our team is developing a home imaging system for Mulitple Sclerosis patients that automatically identifies changes in disease activity and allows physicians to assess their patients remotely. We believe AI is the bridge that will enable everyday people to monitor their brain health at home.
Other AI in Healthcare ideas worth exploring.
Robot-assisted Surgery
Therapy/healthcare bots
Rise of AI-as-a-medical-device
Automated Image Diagnoses
Virtual Nursing platforms powered by AI
3. Artificial Intelligence in Education
Artificial Intelligence is already changing the education industry with the advent of innovative learning models and smart algorithms. These new systems will change the classroom, as well as learning and teaching techniques. AI in education is thus, expected to hit approximately $2 Billion by 2023, growing at a 38% CAGR. This is big for tech giants, AI and education startups - and here are the ideas worth pursuing.
AI-powered companion robots in education.
AI will shape the future of education by eliminating the need for the current one-size-fits-all system. Using AI takes a child's learning needs, pace, and interests into consideration to create custom and individual lessons off this baseline.
Ultimately, true AI will gradually adjust the content based on the child's learning capabilities and continue to grow with them throughout their education.
ROYBI is a friendly robot that personalizes your child’s learning experience, teaching them new languages and skills
Additional AI in Education ideas worth exploring.
Intelligent tutoring systems
Smart campuses - combining AI with the Internet of Things (IoT) to build smart learning environments where devices communicate among themselves and with students and teachers.
Omni-choice learning pathways
Virtual facilitation, personalized learning, and automated performance monitoring
4. Robotics & AI in the Automotive Industry
The value of Artificial Intelligence in the automotive industry is expected to exceed $10.73 Billion by 2024. It's no surprise that the automotive industry is one of the sectors that is already leveraging AI to augment, mimic or support human efforts in areas such as automotive manufacturing, driving, and insurance among others. Check out the AI ideas bound to shape the future of the automotive industry.
Automotive Radar for Full Autonomous Vehicles
Just as we use our senses to perceive the world around us, automated vehicles must do the same.
AI applied to autonomous driving in this way allows vehicles to learn how to drive smoothly in complex scenarios, and to perceive the world reliably and safely, This progression is essential for the system to make critical driving decisions, eventually getting us from highly automated driving to full autonomy.
Metawave’s advanced AI (AWARE™) is integrated with our analog beamsteering radar (WARLORD™) to tell the hardware not only what it sees, but where to look. Metawave is extending the latest advances in object detection and reinforcement learning to our unique hardware, extending the capabilities of even the best sensor suites.
Predictive & Autonomous Vehicle Maintenance
Artificial Intelligence will help create systems that tackle predictive maintenance for autonomous cars, focusing on the wearing parts of the driving gears [tires, wheels, shocks, brakes...] that are not equipped with sensors.
When there will be no driver on board, solution for self diagnostic will be able to trigger maintenance services that are necessary to keep SLA in terms of safety and comfort.
CARFIT combines NVH [Noise Vibration Harshness] data science with distributed machine learning to "read" car vibration and anticipate maintenance needs. AI will allow autonomous maintenance.
Human-Robot Collaboration
Industrial robots lack the ability to safely co-exist with people in a manufacturing environment – they are caged off and factories can’t reach full potential in terms of flexibility and efficiency.
With advanced computer vision, AI, and 3D, time-of-flight sensing, we can break down the barriers between humans and machines. This allows us to bring together the ingenuity, judgement, and dexterity of production workers, and the strength and precision of machines to ensure a more fluid production process.
Veo Robotics is transforming manufacturing by bringing perception and intelligence to industrial robots, making them aware of people’s presence and allowing them to work side-by-side with human workers
More AI in Automotive ideas worth exploring
Vehicle localization and mapping
Driver face analytics and emotion recognition
Automated On-Road customer services
Anomaly and object detection
Predictive maintenance
Building generative models of the real world
Connected vehicles
Robo-auto manufacturing systems
Automotive insurance
5. Artificial Intelligence in Business
From data analytics to smart chatbots and robot customer service representatives, AI is already augmenting humans in the business world - and will continue to do more. Here are the the AI ideas shaping the future of business and work.
Intelligent Assistants
In the past five years, deep learning has solved fundamental problems in computer vision to enable previously unforeseen technologies such as autonomous cars.
In a similar vein, the last 12 months have witnessed the rise of transformer networks which have shattered benchmarks in more than 20 NLP tasks, bearing a striking resemblance to AlexNet in 2012 and the advances that followed.
At Steam AI, we see a clear path to advance the state-of-the-art in applications ranging from customer service bots and IVR systems to search and text analytics tools, all using this core language modeling approach. This is the beginning of a golden era in NLP.
Smart automation and assistance
Business professionals don’t want to manage multiple apps and software packages just to get traction on ideas and drive productive teamwork.
This means many business activities would need to be automated, and that's where smart assistants powered by AI comes in.
At Gravatate, we envision introducing AI and ML into our platform to automate actions so you can accelerate beyond collaboration into execution helping you scale your time.
Conversational AI
We are in an unprecedented time in history when “consumerization” of strategic advances has created new customer expectations.
And this is where the sense of urgency is coming from – businesses must meet and exceed, or risk losing their customers to a competition that is innovating customer services to create the consumer experience needed.
That is why we at Dasha.Ai are at the forefront delivering the first Voice conversational A.I. solution indistinguishable from a human, replacing legacy IVR with an A.I. platform that seamlessly integrates within our customer’s eco-systems
Other Industries that AI will Revolutionize
Smart City: AI sensors and data analytics would help transform urban mobility, water supply, public safety, security, power supply, and surveillance.
Cybersecurity: Artificial Intelligence will help organizations and governments to predict attacks before they happen.
Supply Chain Management: AI is already transforming the supply chain industry and will do even more in the future. Areas that AI will impact include supply chain planning, logistics and shipping, warehouse management, and procurement.
Energy: Implementation of AI in the energy sector will transform the supply of energy and its exploration.
Agriculture: Robo-harvestors, crop monitoring, and soil analytics are some of the areas in agriculture where AI would be a game changer.