Starbucks, IBM, Hotels, et al

Dear Readers,

A spot of humor for the week:

Ending the week on a winning note, it was a joy to read an IBM's Global AI Adoption Index 2022 survey which revealed that Indian and Chinese companies are taking the lead in use of artificial intelligence compared to their peers in major technically-advanced countries. According to the survey, 35 per cent of companies globally reported using AI in their business and when compared with 2021, organizations are 13 per cent more likely to have adopted AI in 2022. As per the index, Chinese and Indian companies are leading the way, with nearly 60 per cent of IT professionals in those countries saying their organizations already actively use AI, compared with lagging markets like South Korea (22 per cent), Australia (24 per cent), the US (25 per cent) and the UK (26 per cent).

Our blog this week speaks about how Starbucks is winning customers using big data. The launch of the Starbucks rewards program via the mobile app led to a massive upswing in sales from current customers. This success can be attributed to using the available data to their advantage by recognizing the customers’ purchase patterns and helping barista's know the incoming customer's most ordered drink. The app even suggests new launches which match with the customer's taste. This and more such insights make this blog a compelling read.

Our other blog Why Hoteliers and Travel Entrepreneurs Must Automate Dynamic Pricing makes for a compelling read to understand how hotels across the world have been using AI, intelligent  pricing tools mapped with revenue, and predictive analytics tool to up their skin in the game.

Alex Kendall, CEO, wayve.ai, has recently announced their collaboration with Microsoft towards developing the supercomputing infrastructure to enable autonomous driving to be built at scale with end-to-end deep learning. He elaborated that a lot of work needs to be done conceptually, and that there's no denying that scale is an important ingredient for success. He believes, "autonomous driving (and more generally, building Embodied Intelligence systems) pushes the boundaries of compute even further. For comparison, state-of-the-art language models may have billions of parameters but they are trained with MB sized mini-batches of text tokens."

In another similar development, news has been around about Apple's self-driving vehicle that requires no input on behalf of the passengers. Neither would it have any driver controls, including a steering wheel and foot pedals. Apple has also been filing various car-related patents, and if some earlier reports are to be believed, we could sit in this self-driving car as early as 2025.

Exciting times ahead!

Akash Bhatia

Co-founder & CEO