The state-of-the-art of AI in Italy

A market still emerging, but with great prospects for development. The report drawn up by the Artificial Intelligence Observatory of the School of Management, Politecnico di Milano, certifies that the Italian artificial intelligence market is worth, by 2018, just 85 million euro, with Italian companies showing little awareness of real opportunities: only 12% of medium-large companies, in fact, have already concluded an AI project in Italy; of these, 68% are satisfied with the results. The most widespread solutions are Virtual Assistant/Chatbot.
Solutions such as intelligent voice assistants (just introduced but already capable of generating a market of 60 million euro in 2018, and that in the future will be able to convey new services and applications) as well as autonomous and collaborative robots used in industry, whose market was already worth over 145 million euro in 2017, definitely push towards optimistic forecasts for the near future.
Italian companies still seem to have a rather confused view of the opportunities coming from AI: most of them, 58%, associate it with a technology capable of completely replicating the human mind (a concept that has little to do with the AI practical features), 35% with techniques such as Machine Learning, 31% with virtual assistants only, while only 14 understood that AI aims to replicate specific skills typical of the human being (a vision that is currently popular in the scientific community).