Ryan Letzeiser is the Co-Founder and CEO of Obie, a portfolio management platform for commercial and multi-family real estate recently named a Top 100 Finalist for the 2019 Chicago Innovation Awards. Obie also offers tailored and competitive property insurance products. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a newer technology being applied to commercial real estate (CRE). But implementing the technology can be expensive and require a strong IT team with knowledge of how to properly use it. Cloud-based AI is giving CRE companies easier access to technology without having to overcome the hurdles of expense, expertise, and information.

One of the effects of the COVID-19 public health emergency is that it has added urgency and speed to technology transformations that were already occurring, such as cloud migration and deployments of artificial intelligence and machine learning. At few places is that shift more pronounced than at Rochester, Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic, which six months before the pandemic arrived in the United States had embarked on a decade-long strategic partnership with Google Cloud. "Our partnership will propel a multitude of AI projects currently spearheaded by our scientists and physicians, and will provide technology tools to unlock the value of data and deliver answers at a scale much greater than today," said Mayo CIO Cris Ross at the time. Shortly after the partnership was announced, toward the end of 2019, the health system hired longtime CIO Dr. John Halamka as president of Mayo Clinic Platform, tasking him with leading a cloud-hosted, AI-powered digital transformation across the enterprise. In the months since, like the rest of the world, Mayo Clinic has found itself tested and challenged by the pandemic and its ripple effect – but has also embraced the moment as an inflection point, a powerful moment to push forward with an array of new use cases to drive quality improvement, streamline efficiency, and boost the health of patients and populations in the years ahead.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has changed the face of rapidly growing technology, and every company nowadays is looking to take maximum benefit from it. In this blog, we will discuss the top benefits of artificial intelligence for businesses. Businesses' first and foremost motive is to engage more customers towards their services, provide the best customer experience, and drive maximum revenue out of it. All the businesses quest to find the right way to ease their efforts and maximize their efficiency with minimum equipment. Their hunt for all these ends right away with the AI because of the extensive benefits of artificial intelligence, which eventually helps them to make their business a profitable one.

The White House is hosting a conference on the future of artificial intelligence. Executives from 38 companies, including Intel, Oracle, Ford, Boeing, Mastercard, Microsoft, and Accenture, will attend the daylong summit. Why is it happening now? AI is poised to create 2.3 million jobs by 2020, while eliminating another 1.8 million jobs, according to Gartner. Topics of discussion are said to include how industries like health care and transportation can best use AI, as well as how to fund research in the field.

Businesses who begin exploring artificial intelligence (AI) technology will soon become aware that an affordable and relatively easy solution exists for addressing specific problems: leveraging cloud-based AI. Instead of installing new software at considerable expense, or beginning the lengthy process of developing your own solution, today your company, or you as an individual, can access APIs readily made in the cloud to do your heavy lifting for you. It comes as no surprise that three of the big names in cloud-based AI are Google (Google Cloud), Amazon (AWS cloud), and Microsoft (Azure). They all offer AI platforms where you can access similar things: machine learning (ML) toolkits for your natural language processing (NLP), image recognition, and data crawling needs, as well as much more. It is a common difficulty when choosing between the product offerings of the big three tech giants: they all offer a similar service, and all of them appear to be of a high quality.

Ten years ago, researchers thought that getting a computer to tell the difference between a cat and a dog would be almost impossible. Today, computer vision systems do it with greater than 99 percent accuracy. Joseph Redmon works on the YOLO (You Only Look Once) system, an open-source method of object detection that can identify objects in images and video -- from zebras to stop signs -- with lightning-quick speed. In a remarkable live demo, Redmon shows off this important step forward for applications like self-driving cars, robotics and even cancer detection. Joseph Redmon works on the YOLO algorithm, which combines the simple face detection of your phone camera with a cloud-based AI -- in real time.

Meagan Metzger is the founder of Dcode42, an accelerator program for companies with innovative technology products for which there is a current or potential future government need. Dcode42 recently partnered with Amazon Web Services to help speed the adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning for problem solving in government. GCN spoke with Metzger about the role of AI in government and ways cloud-based AI can help government solve challenges. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. GCN: What government challenges do you see AI solving?