This report focuses on analysis of Artificial Intelligence (AI) acquisitions completed between January 2021 to December 2023. A total of 461 AI deals have been analysed during this period based on the deal count, deal value, sector, geographies of the buyer and target company, and the focus area of the acquisition. For example, there has been lot of buzz around Generative AI, since the launch of ChatGPT and Microsoft’s investment in Open AI in 2021. This has led to an increase in the acquisition of organisations that use or develop AI products using Natural Language Programming (NLP) and Machine Translation.
The analysis of these acquisitions provides an outlook on the state of the AI market over the past three years based on multiple attributes such as investment range, geographic focus, AI use-cases/ deployment focus area, target sectors, and deal value (where available).
All acquisitions have been categorised against the use cases to which they relate. Transforma Insights identifies 42 main categories of AI Use Cases as illustrated below.
These 42 Use Cases are categorised into five groups:
With regard to vertical sector, the acquirer and the acquiree have been classified across 21 different industry verticals sectors comprising Agriculture, Forestry & Fishing, Mining & Quarrying, Manufacturing, Electricity, Gas, Steam & A/C, Water Supply & Waste Management, Construction, Retail & Wholesale, Transportation & Storage, Accommodation & Food Service, Information & Communication, Finance & Insurance, Real Estate, Professional, Scientific & Technical, Administrative, Government, Education, Health & Social Care, Arts & Entertainment, Other Services, Consumer and Cross-vertical.
1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
2 CONTENTS
3 SCOPE
4 STATE OF AI ACQUISITIONS 7
4.1 AI acquisition count
4.2 Major deals based on their deal value
4.3 Buyer and Target sector focus
4.4 Deals by geography
4.5 Financing source
4.6 Use-case focus for AI acquisitions
4.7 Technology companies are the largest buyers
5 CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS
6 DATA AND METHODOLOGY
6.1 Taxonomy of Buyer and Target sectors
6.2 Taxonomy of AI Use-Cases
7 FURTHER READING
8 ABOUT TRANSFORMA INSIGHTS