When it comes to tech industry buzzwords, no term is thrown around more than “Artificial Intelligence.” No, AI isn’t all about evil robots hellbent on taking over the human race. Rather, these machines are helping to make human’s lives easier at every turn.
The way we shop online, how we receive healthcare and even how we consume media are all being positively affected by artificial intelligence. Unsurprisingly, the San Francisco Bay Area is playing a massive part in ushering in the next generation of this transformative technology. Check out 15 San Francisco-based companies on the forefront of the AI revolution.
Industry: Adtech + Machine Learning
Founded: 2006
What they do: Quantcast’s AI-driven audience behavior platform helps brand marketers and publishers quantify audience insights. The intelligent platform generates audience details in real-time to create granular, specific and predictive models to show marketing teams what types of audiences best respond to their efforts. The company works with global brands, like McDonald’s, Whole Foods, Toyota and Blue Apron, to formulate and optimize audience insights.
Industry: Marketing Tech + Mobile
Founded: 2012
What they do: Leanplum uses AI to create app and messaging experiences that increase customer lifetime value. The platform’s artificial intelligence recommends solutions for mobile engagement, personalization, automation and growth. It uses everything from push notifications to in-app messaging and A/B testing to give marketing teams detailed insights into a customer experience.
Industry: Computer Vision + Software
Founded: 2008
What they do: Figure Eight is a Human-in-the-Loop platform that creates high quality training data for machine learning projects. The company’s platform has data training solutions for text and natural language processing, video and computer vision, search relevance and speech-to-text. Spotify, Oracle and Adobe all use Figure Eight’s data training platform to ensure that their machine learning tools are top notch.
Industry: Content + Machine Learning
Founded: 2009
What they do: Grammarly is an AI-powered writing assistant helping to catch our spelling and grammar mistakes. The Chrome app analyzes writing on Gmail, Twitter, LinkedIn, Slack, Medium, Facebook, etc., and will suggest everything from spelling corrections to phrases that better match the style and tone of the content.
Industry: Sales + Software
Founded: 2015
What they do: Chorus.ai is a sales intelligence platform using AI to capture, store and analyze a sales team’s calls. The platform unlocks insights from calls and uses them to prioritize optimal deals, replicate behaviors that drive quota attainment and track sales lifecycles. Additionally, Chorus’ technology resurfaces winning call tactics to coach teams on correct sales tactics.
Industry: Marketing + Sales
Founded: 2016
What they do: People.ai uses artificial intelligence to uncover revenue opportunities for sales, marketing and customer success teams. The company’s Revenue Intelligence System (RIS) automates the capturing of all contact and customer activity data, updates CRMs and provides actionable marketing and business intelligence insights. Zoom, Lyft and Splunk all use the People.ai platform to optimize their revenue opportunities.
Industry: Software + Analytics
Founded: 2010
What they do: Quid is a contextual AI platform that extracts meaning from any written content (like news, product reviews, forums, etc.) and turns it into visualizable data. The data produced by Quid helps businesses see connections, trends and insights that can help them better understand competitors, their market and customers.
Industry: Real Estate
Founded: 2013
What they do: HouseCanary’s real estate valuation platform uses AI to accurately predict home valuations for investors. The platform uses millions of data points (including historic price growth, neighborhood comparables and market forecasting) to accurately value home prices up with a remarkably low 2.9% Median Absolute Prediction Error. Additionally, HouseCanary’s Market Explorer gives investors insights into neighborhoods with data on rental returns, market demographics, future growth predictions and more.
Industry: Content
Founded: 2015
What they do: Qordoba’s AI helps digital teams produce content with consistent styles, terminologies and voices. It makes it difficult to craft consistent marketing materials since each digital content writer naturally has their own style and voice. Qordoba constantly analyzes writing, and makes suggestions, so businesses can consistently create on-brand content experiences across every channel and platform.
Industry: Customer Service + Software
Founded: 2011
What they do: Directly allows companies to launch and train virtual customer service agents with their expert-in-the-loop platform. The company’s AI trains virtual agents to respond to customer complaints, questions and needs in a humanlike and helpful manner. The Directly AI platform features personalized and empathetic content to handle a businesses’ easiest FAQs, reducing ticket volume by up to 40%.
Industry: Marketing Tech + Software
Founded: 2014
What they do: Blueshift’s platform offers AI-powered predictive content suggestions that helps marketing teams optimize their campaign efforts and increase conversions. The company’s platform lets marketers create hyper-personalized individual user experiences based on data that details a shopper’s style, brand and even content preferences. Blueshift has been used by global brands, from the BBC to Lendingtree, to optimize user experience and boost sales conversions.
Industry: Retail
Founded: 2017
What they do: Standard Cognition’s AI-powered computer vision enables brick & mortar stores to go checkout-free. With the platform, there’s no need for waiting in line for cashiers. Shoppers just walk in, grab what they want and walk out. The Standard Cognition deep learning machines add items nabbed throughout the store onto a running tab and will automatically charge a shopper’s account as they leave the store. The platform can also recognize shoplifting by monitoring a suspicious customer’s behavior and alerting store employees.
Industry: Image Recognition + Machine Learning
Founded: 2016
What they do: Scale offers high quality data training and validation data for AI applications. The company’s API provides access to human-powered data on everything from video annotation for self-driving cars to sensor fusion segmentation for robotics and audio, and speech recognition for natural language processing tools. Scale’s API is currently being used by global innovators, like Pinterest, Lyft, Uber and Airbnb, to train their AI applications.
Industry: Developer Platform
Founded: 2014
What they do: Kite is a plugin for a developer’s IDE that uses AI and machine learning to suggest code completions for Python. The platform will suggest snippets of code based on the current code base (up to a full line of code), including entire function calls ranked by relevance. In some cases, Kite can cut keystrokes for developers by as much as 47%.
Industry: Content
Founded: 2014
What they do: Primer uses natural language processing and machine learning to automate the analysis of large datasets. The company builds AI-driven platforms that read documents, discover insights and generate reports comparable to those of a human. What sets Primer’s computational engines apart from human analysts? Reporting (which takes a human analyst days to complete) is done in seconds. Additionally, Primer AI platforms are also able to read and create actionable insights from multiple languages at once.
