Industries That Are Investing in Artificial Intelligence

The investment in Artificial Intelligence is dominated by tech giants such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Baidu. Whereas, nearly 10% to 30% of the investment comes from non-tech companies depending upon their respective industry. Such companies play a vital role in AI investment and the size of the AI market is merely a fraction of its size to grow in a few years. 

A large part of the investment in AI goes to its development and very less of it is committed to the acquisition of technology from other firms. According to McKinsey, a vast portion of AI investment is used internally or as an investment in the form of Research and Development and its infrastructure. 2016 was the year when companies together spent around $34 billion which was mainly their internal organizational spending. Internal corporate funding aggregates to $23 billion which makes up nearly three times the levels of investment in space. 

Statistics

As per the Trantica Research survey, Artificial Intelligence projected revenue will rise from $26 billion in 2021 to $90 billion in 2025. A report published by McKinsey on the components of Artificial Intelligence investment highlighted five key areas such as machine learning, computer vision, autonomous vehicles, smart robotics, and virtual agents with their shares of 62%, 31%, 4%, 2%, and 2% respectively. 

Several key industries are at the forefront of AI adoption. AI entrepreneur and investor, Bradford Cross pointed out two crucial factors in the businesses such as high profitability and high market capitalization to target them for the adoption of Artificial Intelligence in the initial phase. In another survey conducted by McKinsey, a total of 3000 executives about the adoption of AI applications. Analysis of results showed nearly 32% adoption in the technology and communications sector followed by automotive & assembly and financial services with 29% and 28% respectively.

Demand

Tencent, the Chinese tech giant, estimates that the number of AI engineers around the globe is 300,000 which appears to be a very low number keeping in view the growing demand and as a result of this shortage people are very difficult to find and those hired are paid high salaries. This seems to suggest a vast majority of students are to be trained in the next few years as the field of artificial intelligence is most likely to create a large number of jobs around the world to be part of the much-valued AI workforce. Only big players that are profitable in the industry are in a better position to hire a workforce for AI. New York times suggests that fresh graduates in the field of AI are hired for around $300,000 to $500,000 on average. 

Artificial Intelligence is hard to fill as there is a great demand and it increases by the day. According to Indeed, which is a leading job platform the average number of days to fill an Artificial Intelligence job was up by a staggering period of 60 days. The demand for AI-related jobs included Computer scientists, Algorithm engineers, Principal Scientists, Computer Vision Engineers, Machine Learning Engineers, and Data Scientists. In the same report, it was surveyed that the areas in the US having AI jobs were New York with 12%, San Francisco with 9%, Washington with 8% followed by Boston, Seattle, and Chicago. 

Check out How to Learn Artificial Intelligence (AI) to learn more.

Conclusion

Financing AI has been dominated by technology seeing a good return on investment for companies who aspire to become leaders in the realm of Artificial Intelligence. The financial services sector has been able to pick up AI talent quickly due to their healthy margins. However, for financial services companies and financial services companies, it is a matter of time to see whether they will be leading in the investment in the AI industry or will be knocked out by the tech companies.