The State of Artificial Intelligence Adoption in LATAM

Jorge

6 years ago

The State of Artificial Intelligence in LATAM

The Next Economy will be driven by 10 emerging technologies; artificial intelligence underpins them all. And the race is on for the crown of having the Holy Grail of computing, the countries that are leading in the adoption of ai software are China and the United States.

These countries are way ahead of the rest of the planet; including Latin America.

Endeavor, a non-profit organization that helps entrepreneurs, published a report on The State of Artificial Intelligence Adoption in LATAM (spanish). The report highlights the obstacles and future of the 240 companies that participated in the report; insights were captured using surveys and interviews from 70 projects in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru.

Below are a few highlights from the report:

1. Artificial intelligence adoption in LATAM is in the early stages;
2. In 2017, the average AI company in Latin America sold 1.1 million USD in revenue, and plans to end 2018 with 1.64 million USD;
3. The sectors in which the activity of companies with a high level of AI specialization in Latin America is concentrated in software and services to companies, health and media, although there are a variety of companies dedicated to education, mining, marketing, logistics, retail;
4. 60% of the companies represented in the study have received external funding from one or several sources (33% of seed capital, 29% of private capital, 21% in series A or B financing rounds, and 17% of angel investors);
5. Currently an important group of entrepreneurs (30%), is focused on the development of chatbots, due to the demand and acceptance in the market that these types of applications have seen lately. There is a widespread use of techniques such as natural language processing (53% of cases) and conversion of text to speech (21%), but other types of techniques such as classification and prediction are also widely used (59%), or pattern recognition (39%);
6. The main adoption challenges of artificial intelligence in Latin America are: shortage of talent specialized in AI, lack of training data, ignorance of AI from clients and difficulty finding funds.

To discuss the findings from the report, I’m joined today by Oscar Franco; Entrepreneur Selection Director of Endeavor in Mexico.

Questions:

What factors determine whether or not a company adopts machine learning or another of the techniques that make up artificial intelligence?
Which industries in LATAM have adopted AI the most and why?
How do you see the evolution of the AI industry in LATAM? And in particular in Mexico?
In what ways can the challenges that arise to adopt and implement AI can be overcome?
Which of the countries of LATAM is better positioned to be a leader in the adoption of AI, why?
What can be learned from the USA and China about the rapid adoption of these technologies?
What advantages does Mexico have over other LATAM countries?
In what ways can institutions raise the capacity of talent?

Watch our conversation below: