JUPITER, Fla., Jan. 6, 2022 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- Scheduled to broadcast spring/2022, the award-winning series, Advancements with Ted Danson, will discover how innovations in AI are helping employees to access, understand, and utilize their health benefits. In this segment, Advancements will explore why so many Americans lack an understanding about their healthcare benefits -- from complex rules to complicated, verbose verbiage. Viewers will learn about the many ways these complexities can negatively impact employees' health and well-being, productivity in the workplace, and ultimately, the U.S. workforce as a whole. Audiences will hear from experts at Insurights, an AI-powered startup on a mission to improve human health by giving people better access to their health benefits. The show will discover how developments in AI and technology present a solution for the industry as the Insurights team introduces Zoe, its digital healthcare navigator.

By Swapnil Shinde, a three-time entrepreneur, angel investor, and CEO and co-founder of Zeni, the automated finance management platform for startups. If you've found yourself thinking, "There's an AI-powered solution for everything these days," you're not far off. Today, more than 37% of organizations have implemented artificial intelligence (AI) in some form, and it is estimated that by 2021, 80% of emerging technologies will have AI foundations. When successfully executed, AI is a powerful tool for businesses and consumers alike. It can help businesses scale faster by automating time-consuming processes, create deeper connections with customers through hyper-personalized interactions, make smarter business decisions with access to real-time data from across an organization, plus so much more.

The fortunes of startups that leverage artificial intelligence have soared dramatically in recent years. These AI-powered startups have seen quarterly investment totals rise from a few hundred rounds and a few billion dollars each quarter to 1,245 rounds and $17.3 billion in the second and third quarters of 2019, according to data from CB Insights. The rise in dollars chasing AI startups has been huge, demonstrating strong venture capital interest in the cohort. But in recent quarters, the trend has slowed as VC deals for AI-powered startups fell off. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Thanks in part to research at the University of Toronto, Canada has emerged as an early leader in the artificial intelligence revolution – but truly reaping its rewards will require political vision, an ongoing commitment to diversity and an appetite for winning that, outside of hockey, is rather un-Canadian. That was one of the themes that emerged from this week's Elevate Toronto festival, a three-day event that was designed to showcase the city and surrounding region's growing clout in technology and innovation. Raquel Urtasun, a U of T associate professor of computer science and a star in the AI field, used her time on the main stage at the Sony Centre for the Performing Arts to explain why she decided to make Toronto home – and, more importantly, why she resisted the temptation to relocate when Silicon Valley came calling. "Toronto was and is at the forefront of AI," said Urtasun, who is now the head of ride-sharing giant Uber's new self-driving car lab in Toronto. "The machine learning group, for example, at the University of Toronto is one of the best groups in the world."

Despite the click-baity title, I mean it. I believe that in 2 years, no investor is going to be explicitly looking to fund AI-powered startups. Given that nearly all the startups we see these days are dressing themselves in AI clothes (powered by machine learning! But the reason I believe that no investor will be funding startups calling themselves AI-powered startups (and no startup CEO will differentiate themselves as an AI-first company like Google) is because investors will assume the startup is using the best available AI techniques to solve the problem they are solving. Not having state-of-the-art AI techniques powering their software would be like not having a relational database in their tech stack in 1980 or not having a rich Windows client in 1987 or not having a Web-based front end in 1995 or not being cloud native in 2004 or not having a mobile app in 2009. In other words, in a small handful of years, software without AI will be unthinkable.

AI is touted to change the world in the same way electricity did. But are we moving too fast? While AI has created impact in some sectors, there are some documented instances of enterprises claiming to have automated systems, but actually relying on humans behind the scenes. For our future to stay bright, the real AI startups will need to stand up. On March 22, 2017, Andrew NG, who had been heading Artificial Intelligence (AI) efforts at Chinese tech giant Baidu, announced that he was resigning from the company.

It's the dream of any foodie who watches what they eat to be able to snap a photo of their meals and have their phone instantly tell them how many calories they're about to consume. That's the mission statement of a new startup called AVA, which promises to do away with the dreary manual logging process of rival healthy-eating apps in favor of an altogether more streamlined process. Using AVA's "intelligent eating" service, users will simply take a photo of their food, text it to AVA, and then receive health and caloric information in return. "We're using artificial intelligence to assist nutritionists in estimating calories as well as making recommendations, factoring in historical eating habits, diet patterns, location and behavioral analysis against a database of roughly 50,000 meals," Ian Brady, AVA's co-founder and CEO, tells Digital Trends. "We've seen in our early pilot that factoring in larger data sets makes for more accurate and personalized recommendations, and that these play a considerable role in driving engagement and overall effectiveness of our programs." Since AVA is still in private beta mode, Brady's not spilling the beans on exactly how the technology works but he says that it's a "a combination of image recognition, human recognition and AI algorithms."