SAPanoptikum July/August 2017

AI growth market

McKinsey study: Machine learning is the most important AI technology - companies have so far only used twelve percent of applications with commercial success.

Investment in artificial intelligence (AI) is booming. Last year, companies, especially large technology groups such as Google and Amazon, spent up to 27 billion dollars on internal research and development for intelligent robots and self-learning computers.

A further twelve billion dollars flowed into AI externally in 2016 - i.e. through private equity companies, venture capitalists or as part of mergers and acquisitions. In total, this amounted to around 39 billion dollars, which is three times as much as in 2013.

The majority of current external investment (around 60 percent) is going into machine learning (up to 7 billion dollars), with image recognition (2.5 billion to 3.5 billion dollars) and speech recognition (600 million to 900 million dollars) being other important fields.