A Glimpse at the Thriving Cognitive Start-up Landscape and What Lies Ahead in 2020
I have been writing a lot about cognitive services and how they could transform the enterprise technology market. In a recent article, I looked at the types of cognitive clouds and leading companies in this space — but here’s what I noticed. Considering industry giants like Google, Microsoft, IBM, and AWS is only scratching the surface. Cognitive is a rapidly growing space, garnering interest and investments in various sectors that cut across industry barriers. Here are a few numbers that drive home this impact:
● AI technology funding has been rising steadily for the last half-decade, witnessing a sharp uptick between 2017 and 2018.
● We are well on our way to crossing the $10 billion by the end of this year, thanks to fewer, more high-value deals.
● Most of these companies are at a later stage of maturity, with seed activity gradually beginning to fall.
For enterprises looking to embrace the power of cognitive, the timing has never been better. Promising startups are fast reaching the production stage and industry disruptors are going mainstream. Let’s now look at five AI companies taking massive strides in cognitive-led innovation for 2020 and beyond.
5 Companies Spearheading New Ways to Apply AI
The true potential of AI lies in its cross-industry applications. Unlike other enterprise tools such as CRM, HCM, or WMS you could apply a foundational layer of cognitive services to improve the capabilities of virtually any system, regardless of your industry of operations. These five companies are taking this to a whole new level, with vertical-agnostic cognitive platforms (I’ve arranged them in alphabetical order as their qualitative impact will depend on your business need and area of interest).
1. Compression.ai
This solution uses AI to dramatically reduce the size of image content, optimizing how much cloud storage is used by companies.
The company’s proprietary neural network customizes the compression algorithm as per the requirements of every input so that your compressed file size is only 10–50% of the original. This has incredible implications for content-driven companies saving millions in technology spends over time. Compression.ai also supports multispectral imaging, a feature that’ll be hugely relevant for utility companies, agriculture, and the public sector.
2. Dataiku
Dataiku made headlines last year when it raised a whopping $101 million a Series C funding round, taking its total funding to $150 million. Since then, competitors like Datameer have cropped up wrangling for space a promising AI-led, cloud-based data analytics market.
But the company continues to be a leader in this domain, with its wide range of solutions for self-service analytics that take advantage of cognitive technology.
It simplifies data preparation, letting you apply ML models from within the platform and use a cognitive interface for self-service analytics.
3. Gong
Gong operates in a horizontal that’s seen a lot of cognitive-led activities — sales & marketing. Its AI-based revenue intelligence product empowers executives with accurate information, automated recommendations, and predictions on market strategy.
While it looks simple on the surface, Gong has applied for 20 unique patents, placing it as a disruptor in AI-based enterprise products. Leading companies are already using Gong, including LinkedIn, Pitchbook, and GuideSpark.
4. Shape Security
This is an AI-led cybersecurity company that claims to protect more accounts from fraud than every other company in the world, combined. It has made this list due to the sheer number of successful patents authored (82 as on date) signalling the disruptive nature of its solutions.
In addition to run-of-the-mill features such as threat hunting and DDOS attacks, there’s also fake account identification, protection against credit card application fraud, and checking for fraudulent gift cards. Retail major Starbucks has partnered with Shape to secure its gift card program.
5. Tamr
Tamr has a unique value proposition — in a world where data is the new oil, Tamr understands that cleaning, refining, and mobilizing that oil can be extremely effort and time-intensive. It uses AI to unify data across enterprise silos, building the foundation of a data-driven enterprise.
The underlying technology is called “human-guided machine learning” that can cover hundreds or even thousands of data sources at scale. Toyota leveraged Tamr to unify 6+ million customer records.
Closing Thoughts
These companies significantly increase the use-cases for cognitive. I already surveyed successful implementations for the four industry giants, and I expect even more exciting moves in 2020. But innovation in AI — just like in other sectors should be taken with a grain of salt. A report found that as many as 40% of AI startups in Europe are overtly dependent on human intervention.
(If you’re interested in knowing more about this, check out this article by Towards Data Science.)
That apart, intelligent and future-proof applications of cognitive services, like the ones showcased by these five companies, marks a new era in the development of AI. from security to sales, from content management to decision-making, it has the potential to upend every enterprise process as you know.
