Despite the current pandemic-related downturn, the demand for edge AI chips will grow to outstrip demand for cloud AI chips for the first time in 2025, according to a new report from ABI Research. By 2025, the edge AI chip market will reach $12.2bn in revenue, whereas cloud AI chip revenues will reach $11.9bn in the same time frame. While most AI training and inference workloads are handled in the cloud today, ABI Research predicts that growth in the edge AI chipset market will be driven by increasing demands for low latency and data privacy plus the availability of low-cost ultra-low-power chips designed specifically for this application. AI training and inference will be processed in gateways and all types of edge devices, right down to sensor nodes in the next five years. Save Your Seat for: the Upcoming Webinar on "Mind of Engineer" Survey results "By integrating an AI chipset designed to perform high-speed inference and quantized federated learning or collaborative learning models, edge AI brings task automation and augmentation to device and sensor levels across various sectors," said Lian Jye Su, principal analyst at ABI Research.

The idea of robots picking items from warehouse shelves may still seem futuristic today. But the future may be closer than many people think. Of the almost 1 million robots we expect to be sold for enterprise use in 2020, we predict that just over half of them will be professional service robots, generating more than US$16 billion in revenue--30 percent more than in 2019. What's more, with regard to enterprise spending, the market for professional service robots is growing much faster than that for industrial robots (figure 1). If recent trends are any sign, professional service robots may pass industrial robots in terms of units in 2020 and revenue--in 2021. That's not to say that the industrial robotics market is hurting.

The need for real-time decision making is pushing AI closer to "the edge", giving devices the ability to process information and accelerate machine learning tasks locally. Deloitte predicts that in 2020, more than 750 million edge AI chips are expected to be sold. Further, by 2024, the sales of edge AI chips are expected to exceed 1.5 billion, representing more than 20% annual unit sales growth[1]. The reason behind this rapid growth lies in the fact that edge AI chips are increasingly finding their way into consumer market, in addition to enterprise edge devices. Majority of the consumer edge AI chips will be in high-end smartphones, accounting for more than 70% of all consumer edge AI chips currently in use. Edge AI chips enable organisations to increase their ability to not only collect data from connected devices, but also analyse the data and drive data-driven decision making, while avoiding the cost, complexity, and security challenges associated with storing data on the cloud.

Recent surveys, studies, forecasts and other quantitative assessments of the progress of AI highlight the increasing presence of AI in the healthcare industry, the assistance AI may provide in the future to workers' cognitive tasks, and the continuing acceleration in data production and dissemination. Of the $27 billion raised, U.S. startups accounted for $17 billion, up from $13.3 billion the previous year. Chinese AI startups, on the other hand, raised only $2.9 billion in 2019, down from $4.7 billion in 2018. Big companies wouldn't be investing billions [in AI] if it wasn't producing for them"--Geoffrey Hinton "Artificial intelligence enables us to process the vast quantity of data across our businesses to generate new insights which can keep us ahead of the competition"--Yuri Sebregts, chief technology officer, Shell

Many people may be familiar with the frustration of calling up their smartphone's speech-to-text function to dictate an email, only to find that it won't work because the phone isn't connected to the internet. Now, a new generation of edge artificial intelligence (AI) chips is set to reduce those frustrations by bringing the AI to the device.1 We predict that in 2020, more than 750 million edge AI chips--chips or parts of chips that perform or accelerate machine learning tasks on-device, rather than in a remote data center--will be sold. This number, representing a cool US$2.6 billion in revenue, is more than twice the 300 million edge AI chips Deloitte predicted would sell in 20172--a three-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 36 percent. Further, we predict that the edge AI chip market will continue to grow much more quickly than the overall chip market. By 2024, we expect sales of edge AI chips to exceed 1.5 billion, possibly by a great deal.3 This represents annual unit sales growth of at least 20 percent, more than double the longer-term forecast of 9 percent CAGR for the overall semiconductor industry.4 These edge AI chips will likely find their way into an increasing number of consumer devices, such as high-end smartphones, tablets, smart speakers, and wearables.