We’ve lived in a mobile-first world for the past ten years, but the next decade is going to see us shift to an ‘AI-first’ world. That’s according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, speaking at the launch of the company’s Pixel phone. And it’s not just rhetoric if the current groundswell of acquisitions and announcements are anything to go by. That said, ‘artificial intelligence’, ‘machine learning’, ‘intelligence’ or just simply ‘AI’ are going to become the latest go-to terms in the tech marketeer’s dictionary of hyperbole for the foreseeable future.

The race to commercialise AI has now begun in earnest. In September, an alliance was formed between IBM, Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft. The ‘Partnership on AI’ was created to ‘set best practices, provide an open platform and advance the public’s understanding of AI’. In the past three years, there have been a number of major industry players making acquisitions of relative startups, for fairly significant sums – sometimes into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Now the tech behemoths are starting to provide some insight on where the acquisitions fit, what work they’ve been doing behind the scenes themselves, and ultimately, what their strategies are to ‘surface’ AI.