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.
Highlights
Innovation (00:45)
The IBM Think conference was full of announcements about key innovations, partnerships, and co-creations. Last year, the company announced watsonx and its Partner Plus program. IBM has been spearheading a new ecosystem approach of co-creating AI-based solutions alongside customers and partners. At the conference, IBM announced:
- watsonx Assistant, pre-built AI assistant templates covering common use cases
- watsonx Orchestrate, which enables users to build and deploy their own watsonx assistants rapidly
- A partnership with the AI research arm of the Saudi Arabian government, SDAIA, to build out ALLaM, the largest and best-in-class LLM in Arabic
- InstructLab, a new way to rapidly update LLMs based on new organizational data
A major theme that IBM has been emphasizing this year is that AI shouldn’t just be tested on a small scale; the company encouraged the narrative that it’s time to deploy AI across the company, your customer base, and to various aspects of your operations. This idea was summed up in the phrase “AI at scale.”
The AI Ecosystem Q1 2024 Report compiles the innovations, funding, and products highlighted in AI Ecosystem Reports from the first quarter of 2024. Download now for perspectives on the companies, investments, innovations, and solutions shaping the future of AI.
Funding (03:37)
Orca AI raised a $23 million funding round to build its technology that enables commercial containerships to drive autonomously using AI. The funding round raised its total to about $40 million. The startup claims that its system can yield up to $300,000 in fuel savings per vessel per year, reducing fuel consumption overall by 3% to 5%. It also suggested that the technology can achieve a CO2 emission reduction to 72,000 tons across its 1,000 vessels.
Solution of the Week (06:47)
Truecaller, one of the most popular caller ID services, released an AI innovation through a partnership with Microsoft. The offering enables users to create a voice assistant or answering service based on the user’s own voice using Azure AI Speech technology. The company confirmed that it’s restricting the greeting message to contain a statement clarifying that it’s not the actual person speaking but a digital replica.
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