The adoption and growth of artificial intelligence is happening at a rapid rate. In a recent trio of reports, research firm Cognilytica analyzed the state of AI through worldwide traction and growth in the AI markets. Through these reports, Cognilytica found that AI adoption is not only happening rapidly across the world, but all regions are moving in relative lockstep with one another. In other words, the AI race is on.

While challenges exist with regard to widespread implementation of AI, it is clear that AI is transformative across the world, and it’s resulting in widespread investment, interest and competition.

Global AI adoption

A global survey of over 1,500 individuals across a variety of organizations, agencies and companies reported that by 2025, over 40% will implement AI in one or more of the seven patterns identified in the report. However, almost 90% respond that they will have some sort of in-progress AI implementation within the next two years. This would appear as a contradiction; however, if only 40% said they will implement AI by 2025 it would seem unlikely that nearly 90% would have some form of AI implementation in the next two years.

The most reasonable answer to this anomaly is that AI — its uses and what technologies can be categorized as such — is still misunderstood. This is an issue in long-term adoption of AI and work needs to be done to explain what AI is, how it differs from other approaches and how companies can go about implementing AI with the lowest overall risk.

The state of AI is still in the early majority phase, with many organizations waiting to implement the technology. The more organizations prove ROI and value from AI implementations, the greater the amount of companies that will follow, but until AI reaches broad adoption, we are in the educational phase of AI market growth.

When looking at global adoption patterns, the survey found little difference between the plans and implementation of adoption in regions across the world. North American and European firms are generally ahead in terms of pace of adoption, but Asian, Australian, African and South American companies are all showing vigorous interest in AI.

The report found that the biggest barrier to AI adoption is an insufficient quantity of quality data. This paired with the additional challenge of limited availability of AI talent and skills means that companies that are implementing AI are often slow to make progress.

For those firms that haven’t started their projects at all, the primary challenges lie in justifying AI project ROI and the need to show how AI projects compare favorably to the traditional non-AI approaches to problems.

Country-wide AI strategies

Countries, not just companies, are coming up with plans and strategies to place their economies, militaries and governments in a competitive AI position. In Cognilytica’s “Worldwide Country AI Strategies and Competitiveness” report, the research firm examines every country’s AI strategy across the extent to which the country has a defined AI strategy, the level of government investments in AI, the extent of research and academic activity originating from the country’s researchers and research institutions, the quantity of venture capital and entrepreneurial activity, and overall enterprise investment and implementation of AI systems.

France, Israel the United Kingdom and the United States rate equally high at the top of the strategy list, according to the report, followed closely behind by China, Canada, Germany, Japan and South Korea. These latter countries are lagging a bit behind because they have relative weaknesses in individual areas.

For example, despite China’s strong government financing, academic activity, venture capital and technology funding, and a well-established country-wide strategy, its largest enterprises are not investing in AI to the same extent as the leading countries.

Out of the top 15 ranked countries, 14 have very strong AI research activity. This shows there is a link between strong AI research and other quantifiable measures, such as venture funding, enterprise investment, government investment and country-wide strategy. However, the report finds that government funding, on its own, does not necessarily result in strength in these other areas.

Worldwide AI laws and regulations

Cognilytica also evaluated every country’s overall legal posture, including laws and regulations, data privacy, lethal autonomous weapons systems, challenges relating to AI ethics and bias, among others.

Since, overall, AI adoption is in the early stages, it should be no surprise that most countries have not established any significant laws or regulations relevant to many of the areas above. However, many countries that have the strongest AI strategies are also starting to become more forward-thinking with regard to regulation.

The European Union has been the most active in proposing new rules and regulations, with existing or proposed rules in areas where regulation might be applicable to AI. The United States, on a federal and state level, is also looking at many areas of AI laws and regulation, especially around the areas of autonomous vehicles, facial recognition and data privacy.

AI laws and regulations can be permissive or restrictive. In the case of autonomous vehicles, many countries and legislative regions are looking at loosening or making more permissive their vehicle laws to allow for autonomous vehicle operation on their roads. On the other hand, already 13 nations are looking at putting in restrictive laws to prevent the use or development of lethal autonomous weapons.

Many countries are seeing the challenges with widespread, unregulated storage and sharing of data and are implementing tighter data privacy rules and laws, which will have possibly unintended consequences with regard to AI. In general, it’s hard for governments and legislative bodies to predict how such widespread technology like AI will impact society and their economies, and as such, it’s quite likely that in the next 10 years we’ll see laws emerge for situations we haven’t even considered today.

These reports communicate the same message on the state of AI: that broad, widespread adoption of AI is underway across a wide range of organizations, use cases and countries. The use of AI has many countries not only building overall strategies to develop its growth, but also put in legislative and regulatory frameworks to deal with AI as it becomes an ingrained part of society.

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We live in a world surrounded by various software and applications and tend to shovel all the data related to our existence without any hesitation. Interestingly public and private sector organizations collect this information, store it and leverage it for personal and public benefits. The big data generated at such a massive scale help analyze people’s preferences and dictate their conduct based on it.

The big data technologies are primarily impacting sectors including banking and finance, media and entertainment, healthcare, education, agriculture and online retail in various regions.

Specifically, the year 2019 witnessed the insurgence of big data technologies and how it is paving way for various countries and regions to envelop established businesses. The up-surging trends predict the new age technologies like big data will soon become mainstream while further helping conceive novel business models.

Here is the list of 10 significant countries and regions across the globe that are leading big data adoption among others.

United States

In the US, the rise in data collection from unstructured sources is one of the major driving factors for its big data market. The increase in this market is owing to the high demand sectors such as public utilities. As various public sector units are using mobile, social networks, and weblogs for their businesses today, these applications and websites are responsible for generating a huge amount of data regularly. This data is utilized for business insights and forecasts. Therefore, big data technologies help the US market provide an edge to the business by collecting, converting, and analyzing the raw data from various sources into meaningful business information.

Canada

According to a market report, the Canadian Big Data and Analytics market reached US$ 1,866.6 million in 2017 and it is expected to grow with CAGR of 9.4 percent by 2022. For businesses in Canada, big data technologies are one of the top software investment priorities in order to derive meaningful insights as well as for automation purposes. Experts believe that big data and analytics implementation is forming a foundation for the future adoption of AI-related technologies.

Japan

In Japan, the big data market is influenced by several drivers, restraints, and opportunities. The key factors of this market are – a sudden rise in the application of social media in order to study the customer behavior pattern by the businesses to make their strategies more effective. The growth in the amount of transitional information also acts as a driver for accelerating the big data market in Japan. Additionally, the proliferation of real-time information from varied sources – web, log files, handheld devices (mobile devices), sensors and others are expected to create ample opportunities for big data.

China

A market report suggests that the big data sector in China will continue to depict steady expansion by 2023. Policy support and technology integration are major factors driving this growth. The report revealed that revenue of the domestic big data sector is predicted to reach US$ 9.6 billion in 2019 and is expected to grow at CAGR of 23.5 percent during 2019-2023. It also said that the size of China’s big data market is likely to hit US$ 22.49 billion by 2023. Observing the up surging graph of big data, the report predicts that AI platforms will become the third-largest sub-market of the overall big data industry by 2023 while replacing commercial services.

UK

Big data technologies in the UK are expected to grow at an astonishing rate in the coming years. Although the focus of this upsurge is on the UK it is being assumed that it will impact the other European regions positively. Research indicates that telecoms firms are already strongly adopting Big Data solutions, but other industries are catching up and expressing a strong interest in its adoption as well. Also, retail banking is likely to overtake telecoms soon for Big Data analytics affecting the industry to its core.

South Korea

The government of South Korea has decided to expand the domestic data market to 10 trillion won by 2022, which has been recently recorded around 6.3 trillion won. The Fourth Industrial Revolution Committee Chairman Chang Byeong-kyu said, “The government’s data policy that does not comply with the changes of the times is acting as a stumbling block to the spread of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. A paradigm shift in data use is required to strengthen the competitiveness of the nascent big data industry.” Reportedly the Korean ministries will nurture big data specialized centers for the abundant generation and collection of raw data by industries.

Russia

In Russia, the main consumers of Big Data technologies are banks, telecom operators and large retailers. The main problems of development of the direction of Big Data are the shortage of qualified personnel, lack of sufficient experience of the Russian implementations and also the high cost of solutions. However, the IRI notes that in the next five years the big data market in Russia will grow by 10 times, to 300 billion rubles by 2024. According to experts, in the upcoming future, there will be more implementations using the technology of Big Data in the public sector. The extensive data arrays which are saved up by federal state agencies serve as a great resource that can be used for the development of digital society. It can also help increase in process performance of public administration.

India

A report suggests that there has been a proliferation in the Big Data and AI ecosystem with several large and small players entering in the last few years. This is expected to lead India in becoming one of the largest Big Data Analytics Market in the world with better use cases and significant opportunities for data scientists in the future. Reportedly, the competitive landscape of the Big Data Technology & Services market in India remains largely fragmented owing to its well-established IT services industry that has been able to leap into the data revolution rapidly. Besides, a number of emerging players have specialized in catering to the Big Data needs of the world across various End-User verticals.

Middle East Region

With a huge amount of data generation, the growth of big data in the Middle East market is because of the adoption of IoT and cloud, upcoming mobile BI and domain-specific solutions, and growth in competition which demands simplified and enhanced data visualization tools. The big data technologies are being used in multiple sectors, such as automobile, construction, healthcare, and energy & power, etc. There, big data is further processed and analyzed to gain worthy business insights. The current scenario of big data in the Middle East region implies that several companies are deploying IoT to provide cutting-edge solutions and insights, which, in turn, will boost the growth of the big data, business intelligence, and analytics market.

South Africa

Leveraging disruptive technologies such as IoT, AI, machine learning, social media, and cloud to enhance citizen engagement, drive operational efficiencies, and improve flexibility inevitably creates massive amounts of data in the South African region. Extracting actionable intelligence from this data requires advanced big data technologies to support various line-of-business functions, which in turn requires appropriate skills and funding. According to research, the wide implementation of advanced, easy-to-use big data solutions is becoming a priority for many South African organizations. In fact, C-suite executives from the government and the public sector find this technology especially valuable and look up to develop their approach to extracting relevant insights and making more efficient business decisions.

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One of the most significant advances for sales in this decade is the growing sophistication and accuracy of predictive analytics—the science of knowing how and why and when people buy, and the best ways to approach them in sales. Predictive analytics is, in my opinion, one of the most compelling uses of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

The sales industry is beginning to catch on. However, inbound marketing and sales (along with many other functions and sectors) must continue to advance their use of AI in the ways their customers will consider useful and welcome, as opposed to invasive or “creepy.”

To that end, my Labs Team at InsideSales.com just completed their newest study on the State of Artificial Intelligence. It’s an interesting read and you can find the executive summary here.

In this report, we asked just under 2,000 people (1,985 respondents) from a variety of backgrounds and locations within the U.S. to give us their perceptions of this disruptive technology. For AI to reach its full potential in sales (and every other applicable industry), it is vital that we understand and respect their opinions well.

In summary, here’s what we learned.

In 2016, the AI market was worth $644 million. In 2017, the market value of AI is expected to double and continue to grow exponentially until it reaches $38.6 billion in less than 10 years.

Consumer-driven companies like Google are leading the charge with more than 11 acquisitions, so far, while business-driven companies like Salesforce, who joined the race more recently, acquired two AI based companies in the last year. AI is here to stay and it’s not just changing the market, it’s shaping the way we live and work. 

When it comes to AI adoption, however, most survey respondents are still getting their feet wet, and are split in their use (and opinions) of AI in both their personal and business lives. Outside of work, more than half (54.7 percent) have at least dabbled with the use of AI. About 10.5 percent could be considered early adopters, using AI on a regular basis.

The data suggests that regular use of AI may have a correlation with income. In the survey, 54.6 percent of consumers say they use AI, however, when it comes to the percentage of consumers using AI all the time, 23.3 percent make less than $25,000 per year. This was the largest percentage in all income brackets, with this demographic consistently showcasing a familiarity with AI.

Today’s consumers experience AI primarily through services geared towards travel or entertainment, such as navigation apps (60.3 percent), video streaming (55.2 percent) and music streaming (47.4 percent). These technologies are familiar to consumers, having been in use for a decade or more.

However, the newer uses of AI have yet to hit critical mass. For example, only 12.0 percent of consumers surveyed find AI-enhanced assistants like Amazon Alexa useful so far. Home automation and bots in the workplace are slower to achieve acceptance as well, with only 5.5 percent and 1.0 percent of respondents respectively reporting regular use of these advances in their day-to-day lives.

What Is Holding AI Back? It’s a Matter of Trust

Even as apps and services that rely on AI continue to become more widespread, the results of our survey show that consumers continue to feel trepidation around AI. In fact, when presented with a list of popular AI services, 41.5 percent of respondents could not cite a single example of AI that they trust.

As with many technological advancements, acceptance is growing most quickly on the East and West Coasts. In New England, only 36.6 percent of consumers reported a lack of trust for AI. Similarly, only 38.0 percent of West Coast respondents report lack of trust.

However, nearly half (49.2 percent) of consumers in the Middle Atlantic region (NY, PA, NJ) report a lack of trust in AI and are especially wary of its use in industries that have historically required a human touch (such as financial planning, hiring or medical diagnosis). Only nine percent of respondents trust AI with their financials, and only four percent trust AI in the HR hiring process.

Consumers also have opinions about the companies they trust to lead the AI transformation and to deliver AI technology that reliably works. When asked to select their top three choices of providers, 54.3 percent of consumers ranked Google first. Apple places second with 46.3 percent of responses and Microsoft, at 40.1 percent, narrowly surpasses Amazon, with 39.6 percent, for the number three spot.

What do these results mean for entrepreneurs? For vendors whose offerings are centralized on AI implementation, you have your work cut out for you to demonstrate safety and reliability and to generate trust. However, the rapid growth of AI should clearly indicate that your prospects for success are increasingly high.

For industries that are indirectly impacted by AI (which is perhaps all of them, but most especially sales), the message from this industry research should be clear: Be respectful of privacy, always (for example, your sales prospect may not be eager to have it be visibly evident to others what they’ve been recently shopping for). Demonstrate the uses of AI that deliver convenience (such as routing them to their best purchase options more quickly) or that shorten their unwelcome tasks (such as filling out applications). Let your use of AI be increasingly evident to consumers in the ways they consider a boon.

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