Russia Hopes to Overtake the US and EU in AI Race

Recent Microsoft Research states that Russia has surpassed the US and major European countries in terms of AI implementation. But what does it really mean?

According to Microsoft, Russian business leaders took second place (first place not specified) in terms of positive attitude to AI — 73%. The Russians, Microsoft notes, also showed a higher readiness for training in the field of Artificial Intelligence: 90% (worldwide — 67.3%), expressed a desire to attract specialists to work more effectively with this technology. 30% of Russian managers are ready to allocate time to adapt to new working conditions, in the world — this figure is 20.3%.

Nevertheless, the research is actually a survey among leading companies’ representatives from certain countries. Figures of the research are simply a reflection of those companies’ attitude towards the technology and barely correlate with the actual market situation.

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The Artificial Intelligence market is projected to cross US$ 191 billion by 2024. These numbers and hype over the topic are making every projected hypothesis a matter of fear because every country is afraid of lagging behind.

As for now, according to the European AI Landscape Research, the US is the global market leader for Artificial Intelligence with a 40% market share, China (2nd) and Israel (3rd) have the next strongest AI ecosystems. Russia is ranked 20th on the list. Data in the Artificial Intelligence Index report show the US as the runaway leader in patents, along with China — it leads in the number of papers submitted to and accepted by major AI conferences.

However, there is room for other countries and companies, including Russia. Many can dominate in applying AI-solutions for certain industries such as petrochemistry, mining, metallurgy, etc. As a proof, in October 2018 the jury of the IoT Solutions World Congress in Barcelona named Finn-Russian ZYFRA among top-10 AI projects, along with giants such as Huawei and Vodafone. By the end of the year, 2018 ZYFRA was awarded as an Entrepreneurial Company of the Year in the AI-based Solutions for Process Industries.

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Our view is that there is a tremendous opportunity for disruption in the applied industrial AI space, although it is still a nascent market to a larger extent. Notably, according to last year’s survey by ZYFRA Group, the US ranks first, followed by China, while India comes in 13th, after Canada in terms of AI development. Russia took no place. The ranking was based on a survey that studied the number and quality of scientific publications on the subject. It accounts for studies about AI in more than 200 countries and in 50 of the most cited scientific magazines.

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