American business publication Fast Company has released its list of the most innovative companies of 2017. The annual list ranks enterprises that “tap both heartstrings and purse strings and use the engine of commerce to make a difference in the world” according to its website.
Amongst the top ten artificial intelligence and machine learning companies are tech giants Google and IBM and startup Iris AI. AI companies also dominated the top 10 global businesses across all sectors with Amazon at number one.
Amazon was selected as the leading company for “offering even more, even fast and even smarter”. The cloud computing giant which is America’s largest e-commerce company is worth $390 billion. Google was a close second due to its array of projects using artificial intelligence that are designed to reflect the search giant’s original mission: organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful.
Uber, Apple, Snap (the company that founded Snapchat), Facebook, Netflix and Twilio were also featured in the list. Meaning that nine out of the top ten most innovative companies are using artificial intelligence or machine learning.
The artificial intelligence top 10 featured companies ranging massively in size from startup Iris AI with 8 employees to IBM with almost 400,000. Here’s the top 10 in order:
01 Google
“When Google CEO Larry Page created a new holding company called Alphabet in 2015, initiatives such as self-driving cars and health tech got divvied up into new companies, and Google became an Alphabet division with a sharper focus on internet services and software. Today’s Google, now led by CEO Sundar Pichai, still dominates web search and online advertising sales. It has the most widely used mobile operating system (Android) and web browser (Chrome). Other venerable offerings, such as YouTube, Gmail, and Google Maps, continue to be the 800-pound gorillas of their respective categories.”
02 IBM
“Over the past decade, IBM has been moving away from its old business of making and selling computer hardware and transforming itself into something a little more modern: a company that offers services like cloud computing and data analytics.
Since Watson became commercially available, the technology has been applied to everything from cancer research, where Watson is used to sort through and decipher millions of medical journals, to retail, where Watson is being used to help shoppers locate exactly what they’re shopping for or similar items. As of 2017, Watson is already available to more than 400 million people and patients.”
03 Baidu
“In 2016, Baidu’s CEO Robin Li publicly stated that the company is actively integrating artificial intelligence technologies into all of Baidu’s major businesses, including the search engine, as well as new businesses such as autonomous driving. In August, Baidu, Stanford, and the University of Washington released an academic study demonstrating that voice input is more accurate and three times faster than human typing on smartphones.”
04 SoundHound
“In 2016 SoundHound launched its Hound virtual assistant, taking on Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and the Google Assistant, and there are now 20,000 developers on the Houndify platform, with the service having already been integrated into 150 domains. Among those enterprises who have implemented it are Samsung, Nvidia, Sony’s Xperia, Yelp, and Uber.”
05 Zebra Medical Vision
“For using deep learning to predict and prevent disease”
06 Prisma
“For making masterpieces out of snapshots”
07 Iris AI
“For speeding up scientific research by surfacing relevant data”
08 Pinterest
“For serving up a universe of relevant pins to each and every user”
09 TrademarkVision
“For helping startups make their mark without any legal confusion”
10 Descartes Labs
“For preventing food shortages by predicting crop yields”
