Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence have been topics of research for over 80 years. The first initial steps into these fields started in the 1950’s with Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy and other key pioneers, but only the most recent technological advancements (check also “Why is everyone talking about AI today?”) have made what we currently call AI possible, more accessible, and widely used.

Those who have been following this industry for many years know about the so called, “AI Winter”. In my opinion, the current media and general enthusiasm around Machine Learning and AI will probably slow down at one point, but, this time, AI is here to stay.

Nicolai Wadstrom, CEO and Founder, BootstrapLabs recently proclaimed,  “the real question to ask, is not in which industry AI will be adopted, but when!”

Today we are experiencing, the renaissance of Artificial Intelligence. The number of papers published in AI has been recently skyrocketing.

An even more interesting trend is that today a growing percentage of artificial intelligence related technologies and research is finally getting to market. At BootstrapLabs, we see an exponential growth of AI solutions that are finally getting ready to be commercialized.

According to the AI Index research, the share of jobs requiring AI skills in the US has grown 4.5x since 2013 and the number of active US startups developing AI systems has increased 14x since 2000.

All of the big tech companies, such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Tesla, and Apple, are actively investing and exploring the application of AI for internal purposes and/or to serve their customers.

Artificial Intelligence M&A numbers also keep growing every quarter.

VC investment in artificial intelligence and machine learning doubled from $6 billion in 2016 to $12 billion in 2017 (Source, KPMG), and investment is at an all time high in the space.

With the AI market projected to grow over 20 fold in the next 10 years to $3 Trillion annually, we believe Applied Artificial Intelligence represents one of the major wealth creation opportunities of this century.

The numbers reported above are only some general signals of AI adoption. To have a better understanding of how many AI applications are in the market today and to learn more about many new AI use cases, I invite you to subscribe to the Applied AI Digest, a weekly newsletter, that I curate with my team at BootstrapLabs.

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