The AI 100 has been released by CB Insights. It’s an annual list of some of the best / high-potential private AI companies in the world.
From new AI architectures to precision manufacturing, this year’s AI firms are focused on tackling some of the hardest challenges across industries, the team at CB Insights notes in a blog post.
CB Insights’ ranking of the 100 “most promising” private AI firms across the globe aims to highlight the transformative potential of these paradigm-changing innovations.
According to CBInsights, the key highlights from the 2024 cohort include:
- 16 countries represented, from the US to France to South Africa
- 30+ categories of solutions, from foundation models to humanoids
- 68% early-stage startups building virtual worlds, autonomous factories, language models for under-represented languages, and more
- 600+ business relationships since 2016 with industry leaders like Toyota, Netflix, and the World Bank
CBInsights explains that their research team selected the best initiatives based on CB Insights datasets including deal activity, industry partnerships, team strength, investor strength, patent activity, and proprietary Mosaic Scores.
They also analyzed CB Insights’ interviews with software buyers and examined various Analyst Briefings submitted directly to them by startups.
In other reports focused on AI, the McKinsey Global Survey on the current state of AI confirms the explosive growth of generative AI (gen AI) tools.
Less than a year after many of these tools debuted, one-third of their survey respondents say their organizations “are using gen AI regularly in at least one business function.”
Amid recent advances, AI has risen “from a topic relegated to tech employees to a focus of company leaders: nearly one-quarter of surveyed C-suite executives say they are personally using gen AI tools for work, and more than one-quarter of respondents from companies using AI say gen AI is already on their boards’ agendas.”
What’s more, 40 percent of respondents “say their organizations will increase their investment in AI overall because of advances in gen AI.”
The findings show that these “are still early days for managing gen AI–related risks, with less than half of respondents saying their organizations are mitigating even the risk they consider most relevant: inaccuracy.”
The organizations that have already embedded AI capabilities “have been the first to explore gen AI’s potential, and those seeing the most value from more traditional AI capabilities—a group we call AI high performers—are already outpacing others in their adoption of gen AI tools.”
The expected business disruption from gen AI “is significant, and respondents predict meaningful changes to their workforces.”
They anticipate workforce cuts “in certain areas and large reskilling efforts to address shifting talent needs.”
Yet while the use of gen AI “might spur the adoption of other AI tools, we see few meaningful increases in organizations’ adoption of these technologies.”
The percent of organizations adopting any AI tools has “held steady since 2022, and adoption remains concentrated within a small number of business functions.”