Venture Investing in Artificial Intelligence Companies

We have come a long way from the days when Artificial Intelligence (AI) was primarily a research project in academia or in the corporate world, and the size of the market opportunity was unclear. Today, the transformative power of AI is well recognized and the dollar value generated by AI is estimated to be at least a $3 trillion dollars annually (through sales, cost savings, automation, etc.) according to McKinsey. While academia places its focus on general AI, it has been narrow AI, which is designed to handle specific tasks, that has gained adoption and risen as a highly investable space with strong returns for customers and investors alike. On the technology side, a coalescing of trends including the pervasiveness of sensors, cheap storage and compute, and algorithmic breakthroughs have enabled the adoption of narrow AI. Another key factor for narrow or applied AI to materialize is the availability of (good) data at scale.