It takes between 20 days to 30 days for a company to create, negotiate, and finalize a contract, according to Aberdeen Research. And it isn’t cheap — the amount businesses spend on a standard procurement contract increased 38% from 2011 to 2017, to an average of $6,900.
Spurred on by this, Chris Combs and Vishal Sunak, a former Raytheon software engineer and director of sales operations at…
The infrastructure required to handle AI workloads is often as complex as it is sprawling, but a cottage industry of startups has emerged whose focus is developing solutions for end customers. SambaNova Systems is one such startup — the Palo Alto, California-based firm…
Wikipedia offers a wealth of knowledge on countless topics to those who know where to look, but therein lies the rub — navigating its database of over 6 billion articles requires some web-crawling finesse. In an effort to streamline the search, researchers at Salesforce…
Amazon pilots AI-powered customer support agents
February 25, 2020
Might AI help improve customer service for the millions of people who shop on Amazon.com? Amazon intends to find out. In a blog post, the Seattle tech giant revealed that it’s testing two AI-based systems to handle incoming shopper inquiries. One fields requests from customers automatically and without human intervention, while the other helps human service agents respond more quickly and…
Revl raises $5.2 million to stitch together videos with AI
February 25, 2020
Creating even a basic video can be time-consuming and costly, with costs ranging from $75 to $150 per hour. This situation spurred Bruce Pla, Eric Sanchez, and Nelson Vazquez to found Revl, which creates videos and photos optimized for popular social networks and…
Neural networks learn differently from people. If a human comes back to a sport after years away, they might be rusty but they will still remember much of what they learned decades ago. A typical neural network, on the other hand, will forget the last thing it was trained to…
Vimeo launches AI-powered social video editing platform out of beta
February 25, 2020
Vimeo has officially launched its new short-form social video editing platform, a month after first introducing the tool in beta.
Vimeo Create, as the new service is called, represents the first fruits of Vimeo’s reported $200 million Magisto acquisition last year. Magisto, for the uninitiated, is a Qualcomm-backed AI-powered video editing app that analyzes images, speech, and audio to create a…
Staff at a California school district reportedly spent 20% of their time searching for lost documents until they retained the services of a records management company. It’s not a unique problem — the average manager spends four weeks out of the year looking for records…
FogHorn raises $25 million to support edge AI app development
February 25, 2020
The edge AI market — that is, the market for devices that run AI applications locally, without cloud processing — is anticipated to grow substantially in the coming months. According to Deloitte, more than 750 million edge AI chips will be sold by year-end (up from a…
L1ght, a fledgling AI startup that wants to help technology companies combat online toxicity, bullying, and abuse, has raised $15 million in a seed round of funding from Mangrove Capital Partners, Tribeca Venture Partners, and Western Technology Investment.
The company’s substantial seed funding comes as tech companies are struggling to contain offensive and harmful behavior on their platforms.
