Five AI Startup Predictions for 2017

With AI in a full-fledged mania, 2017 will be the year of reckoning. Pure hype trends will reveal themselves to have no fundamentals behind them. Paradoxically, 2017 will also be the year of breakout successes from a handful of vertically-oriented AI startups solving full-stack industry problems that require subject matter expertise, unique data, and a product that uses AI to deliver its core value proposition. Over the past year a mania has risen up around'bots.' In the technical community, when we talk about bots, we usually mean software agents which tend to be defined by "four key notions that distinguish agents from arbitrary programs; reaction to the environment, autonomy, goal-orientation and persistence." Enterprises have decided to usurp the term'bot' to be mean'any form of business process automation' and create the term'RPA', robotic process automation.