Welcome to the AI Ecosystem Report, featuring practitioner analyst and entrepreneur Toni Witt. This series is intended to deliver the timely intelligence about artificial intelligence (AI) you need to get up to speed for an upcoming client engagement or board meeting.
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Highlights
Innovation (00:54)
Accenture and Unilever announced a partnership to further accelerate and scale generative AI (GenAI). At the start of 2023, Unilever got a new CEO and has been outspoken about the potential impact and importance of this technology since. Accenture has invested billions in the last couple of years to become an industry leader in AI implementation, making it well-positioned to work with Unilever.
In late 2023, Unilever opened its AI research and development facility, Horizon3 Labs in Toronto. At the facility, Unilever applies GenAI to three core business functions: marketing, customer service, and supply chain. The Horizon3 Labs team will initially focus on prioritizing three areas of interest: forecasting, modeling complex data relationships with graph technology, and generating insights of trends, patterns, and predictions through AI.
Unilever also announced a new engineering platform called DataLab Ecosystem, which is an internal tool for its R&D teams to take advantage of models, simulation, and data analytics.
Funding (03:09)
Amazon has allocated its $1 billion industrial innovation fund toward investing in startups focused on logistics, supply chain, and fulfillment. Now, the fund has taken on a new area of focus: GenAI. The fund’s investments into GenAI build off of the firm’s prior investments in AI and robotics, aiming to streamline order handling, supply chain analytics, and inefficiencies.
GenAI can create synthetic data, aiding with the curation of large data sets to train models in the robotics industry. Applying new transformer models, generative AI can create datasets that can drastically increase the rate at which these systems are trained, improve accuracy performance, and reduce the cost of training.
Solution of the Week (05:35)
Vertice is focused on SaaS and cloud spend, two of the largest and fastest-growing areas of expense for many businesses. The startup also announced a $25 million series B round of funding. Vertice built a set of tools that analyzed spending on software usage for customers. This provides its customers’ finance teams with a better understanding of what is being spent and which areas might not be a good investment.
The Vertice suite is useful when organizations are investing in AI products and don’t have much tracking for ROI and expenditures. While some larger providers have helped organizations with similar issues, there is still much to develop in the expense management field.
