With the world hurtling to its digital future, companies at the top of each major economic industry are scrambling to prepare themselves for the introduction and onset of AI-driven commerce.

Artificial intelligence has a wide range of uses in business. In fact, most of us interact with AI in some form or another on a daily basis. And over the next few years, it’s only going to become more important in our lives and careers – and will transform the way our society moves.

While the mainstream is just starting to catch on to AI’s capabilities, companies like Google and Intel have been researching and developing the tech for almost a decade.

We’re talking about billions of dollars spent over the years – and with no return for years… until now. Today, AI is smart enough to have real-world use cases, outperform humans, and start producing revenue for the companies who spent years creating it.

And the earlier we familiarize ourselves with how the companies we all know and love are using AI now, the less shocked you’ll be over the next five years when you see how fast it advances.

Here are the top 10 companies at the forefront of the AI revolution.

OpenAI

OpenAI is perhaps the number-one leading AI company in the world right now, with the most advanced AI products currently available to the general public, including ChatGPT – the AI chatbot that went viral in early 2023 and sent AI digital assets soaring by over 300% in one week.

ChatGPT is perhaps the most important new tech since the iPhone. It will completely disrupt internet search, reimagine research as we know it, and be the most useful tool for writers since spell check.

If you don’t believe me, perhaps you’ll believe Amazon, Elon Musk, or Microsoft – the latter invested another $10 billion in OpenAI just last month. Here’s what it can do right now – before its next update improves its performance tenfold:

  • Write unique content based on user input.
  • Generate ideas based on user input.
  • Automatically summarize text into bullet points.
  • Generate questions and answers for research.
  • Identify and extract relevant information from a particular piece of text.
  • Have full conversations in natural language.

See for yourself what ChatGPT can do here.

Microsoft

Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in OpeAI’s ChatGPT could give Microsoft an edge over its biggest competitor and the reigning web search king – Google.

But ChatGPT was only the most recent addition to Microsoft’s already massive suite of AI projects that it’s been quietly developing over the past decade. Its contributions to the AI space cannot be ignored. This includes:

  • Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit – a deep learning framework that lets developers easily create and train AI models.
  • Azure Machine Learning – an AI-based cloud service that lets developers build, deploy, and manage high-quality models to improve enterprise clients’ workflows, productivity, cloud security, and more.
  • Microsoft Bot Framework – a collection of libraries, tools, and services that provides a framework for building enterprise-grade chatbots for conversational AI experiences.

Microsoft is one of the top cloud storage and workflow management providers in the world. Integrating AI into Microsoft’s current services will be a necessity if it wants to keep up with the market, and executives know it – hence the additional $10 billion in ChatGPT.

Oracle

Oracle is another AI powerhouse with Microsoft’s approval that offers a wide suite of AI services, including:

  • Oracle Autonomous Database – a cloud-based service that uses AI to automate maintenance tasks like patching, tuning, and backups.
  • Oracle Adaptive Intelligence Apps – a machine learning service that helps organizations make better decisions based on all available data, including specializations for HR, manufacturing, and more.
  • Oracle Digital Assistant – a complete AI platform to create conversational experiences for business applications through text, chat, and voice interfaces.

Oracle partnered with Microsoft to help integrate its AI into their cloud services. This allows customers to use Microsoft and Oracle cloud services together. The companies are leveraging their individual strengths – Microsoft’s cloud domination and Oracle’s AI advancements – to develop new solutions and grow together.

SingularityNET

SingularityNET is a blockchain-powered company working to create a global network of AI services that is accessible to anyone in the world.

Its primary goal is to create a decentralized AI marketplace that allows anyone to access different AI tools, play around with them, and buy those tools from developers to implement into their own operations or business. This could include language processing, robotics, workflow automation, and more.

Other projects under the SingularityNET umbrella include SingularityDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization that can make decisions based on data to execute commands – for example, stock market trading. The DAO can assess market performance on its own and balance a portfolio accordingly – and is already outperforming human traders.

Watch my interview with SingularityNET founder Dr. Ben Goertzel to get the inside scoop on the groundbreaking tech in this company’s pipeline.

DeepMind

We can’t talk about AI without mentioning DeepMind, who was one of the first players in the AI space in 2010 – the AI equivalent of the stone age.

DeepMind went from a few guys in London teaching AI how to play old video games from the ’70s to a Google-owned AI powerhouse. Today, DeepMind is building full neural networks for AI that can learn from experience without a predefined purpose (machine learning).

DeepMind has successfully built AI that uses trial and error to calculate the best actions to achieve a desired outcome – called “deep reinforcement learning.” This AI is already learning to play complex strategy games like Starcraft II and Go, write code, mimic human speech, and even diagnose eye disease.

Today, DeepMind’s AI-based tech is assisting in various health-care services, security applications requiring facial recognition and anomaly detection, machine language translation, and more.

Amazon

Amazon utilizes AI in all of its departments – including supply chain management, customer service, fraud detection, system maintenance, personalized product recommendations, and more.

Its personalized product recommendations using machine learning algorithms contribute up to 40% of its total business. Its customer service department can resolve issues based on customer expression and emotion – quickly resolving mild complaints that are easily fixed with a product replacement and routing angrier complaints to human representatives to provide additional compensation and empathy.

Beyond the ways Amazon has already integrated AI into its own operations, its Amazon Web Services suite provides other businesses with comprehensive AI and machine learning models to improve operations. This includes Amazon SageMaker – an end-to-end service for any machine learning use case that provides fully managed infrastructure, tools, and workflows.

Oh, and I almost forgot about the Amazon AI that we already know – and who might know us a little too well. Her name is Alexa… perhaps you’ve heard of her.

Meta Inc.

You interact with AI every time you log on to Facebook. It improves your algorithms to provide personalized content, detects objects in your posted photos and videos, detects inappropriate content to remove from the platform, and powers the virtual assistants behind Facebook’s customer service.

The parent company – Meta Inc. – is another tech giant at the forefront of AI research… particularly, machine learning.

AI can compete with humans in Diplomacy, for example – a strategy game that requires understanding of each player’s motivations and views to form a plan and create strategies. This is what Meta’s CICERO project was able to achieve in 2022. They call it Meta learning – AI that can learn from previous experiences and adapt to new environments.

All of this innovation takes place under the MetaMind – the company’s AI research platform that allows developers, scientists, and researchers to build, share, and deploy machine learning.

In an October 2022 meeting with investors, Meta’s CEO said the company is significantly expanding its AI investments and research in 2023.

Intel

Intel has already integrated AI into its hardware-focused business plan as the leading provider in AI hardware and the machine learning tools to accompany it.

The company is already dominating in AI chip manufacturing and has invested at least $20 billion in AI development since 2016. Its AI product suite includes multiple tools for developers to easily develop AI applications, including:

  • OpenVINO – an AI toolkit that lets developers build, optimize, and accelerate deep learning models that can be quickly deployed on Intel hardware.
  • oneAPI – this provides a framework that simplifies AI development across different hardware architectures, allowing developers to use a single programming model that can be deployed across any Intel hardware.
  • Deep Learning Boost – this is AI acceleration technology that significantly reduces the time needed to train AI models, making it easier for developers to build and deploy applications.

 

Apple

Hey, Siri? How does Apple use AI?

It’s thanks to AI that she’d be able to answer that question for you. But I’ll give you a better answer here.

Apple uses AI in a range of its applications already – including every time you unlock your phone using facial recognition or when Siri recognizes your voice and answers your questions without waking up every other phone in the room.

Since her debut in 2011, Siri has only gotten more powerful. Today, she can translate language, tell you the weather, answer your questions on Google, read a bedtime story, make restaurant reservations, and more.

Apple is also developing its own AI chips to accompany what I assume will include entirely different and unique applications from other companies like all Apple products attempt. Its A13 Bionic chipset runs your iPhone’s camera, facial recognition, and augmented Memojis in iMessage.

Netflix

Log on to Netflix and the first thing you’ll see are suggested shows and movies for you to watch next. For that, you can thank AI.

AI powers the streaming service’s recommendations based on your viewing history and preferences, then uses that data to produce personalized picks for what to watch next. Not only does it choose the titles but AI will alter the thumbnail of the content it’s suggesting to increase chances of your engagement.

One of the coolest ways Netflix uses AI (in my opinion) is during preproduction. It employs AI to help decide where and when to shoot a movie given constraints like the actors’ schedules, budgets, venue availability, and production scene requirements.

To learn more about how Netflix leverages AI to improve their service, check out this deep dive.

Conclusion

The history books will mark 2023 as the onset of the AI revolution.

If you can describe what you do for work, there will soon be a robot who can do it better.

The only way to prepare yourself for AI is to invest in AI.

Start with these four assets.