20 Companies Leading the AI Revolution

Japanese consumer electronics company Sharp has staked a claim to the marriage of AI and IoT with a program it calls AIoT, a network of AI-enabled devices that constantly monitor how they are used and adapt to offer personalized services and solutions. The company claims to have more than 150 such products in categories as diverse as pet care and audiovisual systems.

The German engineering and electronics company plans to invest about $340 million by 2021 on AI research at three AI centers around the world. Among the projects Bosch is working on is a deep network for video and radar signal processing for autonomous vehicle sensors.

Korean electronics giant LG’s ThinQ brand offers various products that are integrated with AI functions and services. These products, the company says, “can share and study information between themselves.” As with other AI smart-home forays, LG seeks to train the devices to understand how people use them in order to offer a tailored experience to each user.

As an imaging and electronics company, Ricoh’s AI focus has been on machine vision and image processing. For example, the company has developed a camera system that measures road surface conditions using an ordinary vehicle instead of a specialized one to inspect and schedule maintenance.

In addition to its partnership with Hitachi on a smart power plant, Mitsubishi conducts AI research in computer vision, speech and audio processing, and data analytics. The company also builds cars, and at this year’s CES, Mitsubishi showed off its Emirai 4 smart mobility concept car with an augmented reality, heads-up display, smart-home and mobile payment integration, and biometric authentication.

SGCC is a state-owned power company focusing on AI development in areas including power grid control, power distribution and utilization networks, wind farms, and green energy. In December, SGCC launched a demonstration project for an AC/DC distribution network that connects a data center with solar photovoltaic power plants. The project integrates a smart grid and cloud computing technology that the company says “predicts a new form of power grid development for the future.”

Japan’s largest telecom provider has AI products and development projects in industries as varied as agriculture and health care. NTT recently acquired an NEC NeoFace system that it plans to use to demonstrate the effectiveness of a facial recognition system with a high-speed 5G network.

It is no surprise that Toyota’s AI-related efforts focus on mobility, the latest industry buzzword to encapsulate all modes of transportation, from scooters to flying cars. In 2017, the company established a venture capital arm in Silicon Valley and has made several investments in robotics and AI startups.

Sony has struggled with sales for the very consumer electronics products its known for–TVs, gaming consoles, cameras, and smartphones. Last May, the company’s new CEO, Kenichiro Yoshida, acknowledged the problem and declared that the key to Sony’s survival “lies in the extent to which we can take control of data and AI.” The company’s PlayStation network and its 80 million monthly active users would jumpstart Sony’s efforts.

The German industrial giant focuses on AI-driven industrial processes like optimizing gas turbines, improving smart grid monitoring, and using predictive maintenance for industrial facilities. Siemens Healthineers also use deep learning and AI to automate and standardize medical diagnostics.

Google parent company, Alphabet, acquired DeepMind in 2014, and in addition to using the AI platform to become a Go master (Alpha’s DeepMind AlphaGo application in 2016 beat a human master at the ancient Japanese game of Go), the company has also applied AI and machine learning to reducing its own energy consumption by 40%. The company’s Waymo autonomous vehicle subsidiary is perhaps the best known of Alphabet’s AI and machine learning projects. Some of DeepMind’s capabilities have also been incorporated in Google Search, the company’s cash-generation machine.

The vast majority of Canon’s patents are related to imaging, not surprising for a company best known for its cameras. In 2016, the company acquired Toshiba’s medical imaging business, and last year it introduced an AI-based platform that can produce out of low-dose, low-quality CT scans high-quality images. For patients this means less radiation per scan; for physicians, it means faster diagnoses.

Given its roots in consumer products, Panasonic has been looking for a way to integrate all those devices under a single control system. Late last year, the company released its HomeX smart home controller that not only communicates with people, but also lets devices communicate with one another. The company’s machine learning, AI, and IoT-capable devices “will develop services and products that update over time based on what we find as they are used,” according to Panasonic President Kazuhiro Tsuga.

Hitachi has partnered with Mitsubishi to build fully autonomous digital power plants that will some day be operated by AI. Currently in the proof-of-concept state, the plants need no human intervention except for maintenance. The plant would take orders to produce more or less electricity from an automated grid system, schedule maintenance, and predict three years in advance how the equipment will perform and what capital spending will be needed.

While NEC will be checking credentials at the Tokyo Olympics, Fujitsu might be judging the gymnastics competition using lidar-based (laser) technology (also used in many self-driving cars). The technology uses the images to determine the body position of the contestants and passes the information to the judges to help determine an athlete’s final score.

NEC is providing a facial-recognition system for the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games built around the company’s NeoFace AI engine. The system is being designed to identify some 300,000 athletes, media, and other staff by linking photo data within integrated circuit cards carried by accredited people.

At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, Samsung showed off eight new projects that leveraged AI technologies in video content creation and perfume-making. It also showed an app that picks keywords out of news articles and uses them to generate a timeline of events. Last May, the company opened AI research centers in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Russia to complement existing research locations in the United States and Korea.

Toshiba announced in November a five-year plan that it expects would resurrect the company from a years-long slump. In addition to selling its memory chip business, Toshiba expects to spend more than $150 billion on equipment, research, and development of technologies like Internet of Things (IoT) and AI. According to industry research company Research and Markets Inc., IoT will comprise 83% of the AI chipset market by 2023, and the global market for AI embedded in IoT devices will reach $26.2 billion.

The maker of the Windows operating system is so serious about AI that when it reorganized the company last March, one of the new divisions was focused on cloud computing and AI. The AI portion of the new division is focused on AI computing infrastructure, frameworks, and high-level services related to perception, knowledge, and cognition.

Big Blue received 9,100 total U.S. patents in 2018, a record for the company. Of that total, some 1,600 patents were related to AI, with many related to the IBM’s natural language processing and machine learning techniques. On Feb. 11, when the company’s AI system for debating humans on complex topics, Project Debater, will take on its first challenger.