Cool Vendors in Core AI Technologies

Cool Vendors in Core AI Technologies

Cool or not?  With all the hype (and confusion) from vendors around AI, Gartner is taking the “bull” by the horns and launching a new collection of cool vendor reports just focused on AI.    We have identified the most innovative emerging vendors with “cool” AI offerings that are having a real impact across different business functions, industry verticals, and geographies.  This has meant sifting through the hundreds and hundreds of startups to find the ones that have a genuine AI offering (not simply slapping AI on their websites) and are really unique.

Gartner defines AI through three key traits — the ability to learn, predict and SURPRISE.  Last week, my colleagues and I published our first “Cool Vendors in Core Technologies” research report highlighting five vendors that do indeed SURPRISE!  Many people associate AI with a single technology — chatbots, cloud APIs, computer vision, natural-language processing (NLP) or robotics. In reality, AI is diverse — it is all of the above, and much more. The vendors in this Gartner report have developed core technologies that underpin many different products, scenarios and use cases.  They are diverse and often astonishing to those who don’t follow them closely. Their offerings can be used by both tech providers and end-user organizations business innovators to stay ahead of the competition and to surprise with new solutions too.  Gartner clients can read the report here.

Here are quick highlights of the five vendors:

• Chronocam employs a unique approach to image processing that could disrupt the market for video networks.
• Cortical.io pioneers an NLP approach rooted in neuroscience. It can compare and relate different texts across millions of documents in multiple languages within a generic body of knowledge or customized vertical domain- and jargon-specific databases.
• Deepgram is an AI-based keyword search and classification engine for speech in audio and video.
• Descartes Labs uses computer vision on satellite imagery spanning decades to produce actionable information about the planet.
• SigOpt’s API automatically optimizes the tunable parameters of machine learning and deep-learning models, thereby eliminating trial and error. And it does it without looking at sensitive data.

Read the report for full profiles of the five companies included in Cool Vendors in Core AI Technologies, 2017.