State of Artificial Intelligence in India 2017:

Artificial Intelligence Industry in India is currently estimated to be $180 Million annually in revenues. There are approximately 29 Thousand AI professionals in India. The average work experience of AI professionals in India is 6.6 years.

Around 2,400 fresher were added to AI workforce in India this year. Almost 38% of AI professionals in India are employed with large sized companies – with more than 10K total employee base. Mid size organizations (total employee base in range of 200-10K) employ 30% of all AI professionals in India. Startups (less than 200 employee base) employees 33% of AI professionals in India.

IBM Expands Watson Data Platform to Help Unleash AI for Professionals:

IBM announced new offerings to its Watson Data Platform, including data cataloging and data refining, which make it easier for developers and data scientists to analyze and prepare enterprise data for AI applications, regardless of its structure or where it resides. By improving data visibility and security, users can now easily connect and share data across public and private cloud environments.

By 2018, nearly 75 percent of developers will build AI functionality into their apps, according to IDC1. However, they also face the obstacle of making sense of increasingly complex data that lives in different places, and that must be securely and continuously ingested to power these apps.

Growth of E-commerce in India- Use of Machine learning:

With the advent of e-commerce in India and rising affluence of consumers, that local shopping experience seems to have been replaced with couch-surfing through apps and website, trying to choose from the deluge of options available. Too impersonal, one could argue, except that personalisation through tech innovations is the engine that powers e-commerce today.

E-commerce users in India generate over 30 – 40 TB (Terabytes) of data daily, the equivalent of content in 50 lakh Yellow Pages books. On a typical day, e-commerce platforms receive tens of millions of visits and 100’s of millions of product page views. E-commerce has also, increasingly, become the starting point for most product and price discovery & searches for customers. The scale is indeed mammoth.
And this mammoth data trail provides opportunity for e-commerce companies to deeply understand each & every user.

AI may replace human entirely:

Noted physicist Stephen Hawking once again rung the alarm bells about Artificial Intelligence where he said that AI would eventually “replace” humans. Speaking to an online publication, Hawking said, “I fear that AI may replace humans altogether… If people design computer viruses, someone will design AI that improves and replicates itself. This will be a new form of life that outperforms humans.”

In fact, Tesla and SpaceX’s CEO Elon Musk had said that not North Korea, but AI could be one of the reasons which will trigger World War III. Musk along with 116 other founders of robotics and Artificial Intelligence companies from 26 countries had also signed an open letter and urged the United Nations to urgently address the challenge of lethal autonomous weapons and ban their use internationally.

MIT Creates AI Writer To Pen Horror Stories:

It may not exactly be Dracula or Frankenstein, but this new AI-based programme created by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers will now attempt to really try and scare humans.

Data analytics in the US$4.5 Trillion a year insurance industry:

Data is to this century what oil was to the last: an immensely lucrative and vastly untapped asset. Similar to how nations have capitalized on oil to drive wealth generation, some of the biggest corporations in the world such as Facebook, Google and Amazon have been able to leverage data and turn it into billions of dollars in profits by delivering targeted, more relevant and valuable services to consumers.

The financial services sector has been quick to capitalize on data management and analysis technology. For example, banks are analyzing captive data to identify fraudulent transactions. According to estimates by market research company IDC, the global market for big data and analytics is expected to reach US$150.8 billion by the end of 2017. Of this, the banking sector alone spent nearly US$17 billion on big data and analytics in 2016, and is set to see the fastest spending growth on such services through to 2020. Specifically, the insurance sector is well positioned to leverage data and artificial intelligence in digital transformation efforts. According to an EY report, the global insurance sector was worth US$4.5 trillion in 2015.