Artificial intelligence is permeating business at last

THE machines are coming for your crops—at least in a few fields in America. This autumn John Deere, a tractor-maker, shipped its first fleet of fully self-driving machines to farmers. The tilling tractors are equipped with six cameras which use artificial intelligence (AI) to recognise obstacles and manoeuvre out of the way. Julian Sanchez, who runs the firm’s emerging-technology unit, estimates that about half the vehicles John Deere sells have some AI capabilities. That includes systems which use onboard cameras to detect weeds among the crops and then spray pesticides, and combine harvesters which automatically alter their own setting to waste as little grain as possible. Sanchez says that for a medium-sized farm, the additional cost of buying an AI-enhanced tractor is recouped in two to three years.

For decades starry-eyed technologists have claimed that AI will upend the business world, creating enormous benefits for firms and customers. John Deere is not the only proof that this is happening at last. A survey by McKinsey Global Institute, the consultancy’s in-house think-tank, found that this year 50 per cent of firms across the world had tried to use AI in some way, up from 20 per cent in 2017. Powerful new “foundation” models are fast moving from the lab to the real world. Excitement is palpable among corporate users of AI, its developers and those developers’ venture capital backers. Many of them attended a week-long jamboree hosted in Las Vegas by Amazon Web Services, the tech giant’s cloud-computing arm. The event, which wrapped up on December 2, was packed with talks and workshops on AI. Among the busiest booths in the exhibition hall were those of AI firms such as Dataiku and Blackbook.ai.

The buzzing AI scene is an exception to the downbeat mood across techdom, which is in the midst of a deep slump. In 2022 venture capitalists have ploughed US$67bn into firms that claim to specialise in AI, according to PitchBook, a data firm. The share of VC deals globally involving such startups has ticked up since mid-2021, to 17 per cent so far this quarter. Between January and October, 28 new AI unicorns (private startups valued at US$1bn or more) have been minted. Microsoft is said to be in talks to increase its stake in OpenAI, a builder of foundation models. Alphabet, Google’s parent company, is reportedly planning to invest US$200m in Cohere, a rival to OpenAI. At least 22 AI startups have been launched by alumni of OpenAI and Deepmind, one of Alphabet’s AI labs, according to a report by Ian Hogarth and Nathan Benaich, two British entrepreneurs.