The 2021 Crystal Ball For Emerging Tech - AI Summary

It's been a breakout year for AI in healthcare in particular: The pandemic drove AI-assisted disease research and drug discovery, as companies focused on studying Covid-19 or helping to develop a vaccine. Clinical decision support--the use of AI in diagnosing diseases--was the most active category of AI (in terms of number of deals) in Q3 2020, according to PitchBook data. "We think that the success that AI algorithms are having in diagnosing certain diseases is starting to make the adoption of those technologies feasible, which hasn't been the case historically," says Brendan Burke, a senior emerging technology analyst at PitchBook. Demand will likely rise for "equity engineers," or people who can work with AI tools to help remove biases and make the systems "much more representative of the world around them," says Peter Barrett, founder and general partner at venture fund Playground Global. That's led to an even hotter market for last-mile delivery tech: This year, electric vehicle startups Rivian and Arrival partnered with Amazon and UPS, respectively, on future fleets of electric delivery vans.