How Reliable are Surveys of AI Adoption by Companies?

.@bershidsky Leonid Bershidsky, a Bloomberg columnist, argues that the problem with surveys of Artificial Intelligence (AI) adoption in companies is twofold: 1) The lack of agreement on a definition of AI itself; 2) Executives feel unbearable peer-pressure to say they are using it!  But even among companies who actually adopted AI, https://t.co/RpBiN7MHwC few applications are being developed to be unambiguously labour-saving. The much-vaunted cost savings from AI deployment may then not arise. Given the extraordinary peer-pressure executives now feel to deploy AI (or at least not to admit that they are not deploying it!) the likelihood now is that the very attempt to deploy AI might itself becomes a recurring cost, thus weakening the business rationale for AI! So the somewhat cynical wisdom would be 'Wait till the dust settles to get on board'.

— Satyen Baindur (@Satyen_Baindur) March 10, 2019

The AI Hype and VC Funding for Startups

.@ft According to this article from the Financial Times, as many as 40% of 2830 'AI startups' in Europe (@MMC_Ventures Survey) don't use any AI programs at all, in their products (as of the time the survey was taken).  The same survey said that the median size of a funding round for an 'AI startup' in 2018 was 15% larger than a similar funding round was for 'just software' startups. One can see how big an incentive this creates for a 'just software' startup to declare itself an 'AI Startup'. Given this, one is actually a bit surprized that only ~8% of all 2018 startups were AI startups! (though, to be sure, the universe here includes non-software startups too.) But there sure is a lot of #AI #Hype via @IanHathaway https://t.co/2qscQS8PeF

— Satyen Baindur (@Satyen_Baindur) March 5, 2019