Artificial intelligence could be a $14 billion industry by 2023

A visitor speaks to Baidu's robot, Xiaodu, at the 2015 Baidu World Conference in Beijing, China, September 8, 2015. A recent report asserts that the artificial intelligence (AI) industry will reach a compound annual growth rate of 17.2% by 2023. The market is set to swell to a whopping $14.2 billion over the next six years, up from just $525 million in 2015. Natural language processing technology is set to be a huge contributor to this growth. This tech is being adopted rapidly, particularly by financial institutions, because it can carry out customer service transactions and answer common questions in the place of human employees.