Artificial Intelligence - Assessing the status of AI within the major ecosystem players

In our newest sector report, Edison's Richard Windsor explores the evolution of AI and assesses the status of the AI initiatives within the major ecosystem players Alphabet, Baidu, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Yandex.

Adding AI as a key metric to assess ecosystem platform strength

While AI is in many ways still in its infancy, the big ecosytem players are investing heavily. This is because good quality AI has the potential to significantly improve the quality of the Digital Life services upon which these businesses are based.

For this reason, Edison has now added AI as its eighth law of robotics, used to assess the strength of the major ecosystems platforms. These are now:

1. Easy and fun: An ecosystem must provide easy and fun access to digital life
2. Set up: An ecosystem must be simple and easy to set up and use
3. Traffic capture: An ecosystem must capture traffic on its own servers
4. App equivalency: An ecosystem must offer access to a good range of third-party apps
5. Data sharing: An ecosystem must allow Digital Life services to share data
6. Data integration: An ecosystem’s user data must be integrated
7. Software consistency: An ecosystem must have consistent device software....and adding for the first time..
8. Artificial intelligence: An ecosystem must have good and effective artificial intelligence.

Search Engines in the lead

At this stage, AI requires vast amounts of human labour, great skill and copious data to develop. This hands a substantial advantage to those that have been doing it the longest. As understanding data has been the livelihood of the search engines for many years, we believe that the search engines - Google, Baidu and Yandex that are the global leaders in AI. They are all also aggressively investing to maintain their advantage.

Microsoft, Apply and Amazon the fast followers

Fast followers are made up by Microsoft, Apple and Amazon. Both Microsoft and Amazon have scope to earn a return on AI in their businesses that are not part of the ecosystem. Apple appears to have voluntarily hobbled its AI development with differential privacy. We also believe that the performance of Siri has fallen behind that of Google and is barely on a par with Cortana (Microsoft).

Facebook needs to fix automation

Facebook is the laggard with one of the weakest positions in AI out of these players. Edison research indicates that Facebook has real problems with automation. If these are not fixed, we believe providing customised services to 1.8bn users manually could become cripplingly expensive.

Pace of M&A may mean that the best AI is soon owned by the largest and richest companies

The race is a long way from being run however. We have recently seen a huge upswing in M&A activity by the ecosystem players and see no sign of this abating in the near term.  It is those with the deepest pockets such as Google, Amazon, Apple, Intel and so on that are heading the M&A activity table, and as a result, Edison believe that the best AI will soon be found inside the largest and richest companies.

You can read about this in much more depth in the full report – which can be downloaded here..