The AI boom: These Florida companies are using artificial intelligence

Lianna Norman, Palm Beach Post
Updated ·5 min read

Artificial intelligence has been integrated into our everyday lives since before the craze over programs like ChatGPT sprung up. You've been interacting with AI for longer than you've been aware of it. Companies like TikTok, Twitter, Google and Apple use AI to customize each user's on-screen experience to fit their taste. It's incorporated into almost every big business that lives on the internet.

Your personalized feed of content on all of your social media platforms, your iPhone's automatic suggestions and even some features in electric vehicles are all possible through artificial intelligence. You may not be directly chatting with a robot, but these everyday experiences have algorithms built into them that learn your behavior.

But, it's undeniable that there is currently a huge boom in internet users' intentional interaction with more human-like AI. Services like ChatGPT are helping people generate personalized product pitch decks, meal plans, workout plans, advertising strategies and even business plans in real time.

But where do you interact with AI unknowingly? Here is a roundup of places you interact with AI everyday, Florida companies and entities that use AI and some AI companies that are based in the sunshine state.

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What is AI commonly used for already?

Nearly everything you do on your phone is littered with artificial intelligence that learns patterns in your behavior as a user and utilizes that information to customize your online experience and personalize your home screen. Has your maps app ever suggested you drive to a location you frequent at the time you typically go there? That's artificial intelligence. Have you ever enjoyed the benefits of Spotify's customized "discover weekly" playlist made up of songs you might like based on your listening history? Again, that's artificial intelligence. Even unlocking a phone with facial recognition requires the use of AI.

Artificial intelligence is any computerized function or algorithm that performs tasks that once needed human intelligence — like aggregating and organizing data used to keep businesses meeting or exceeding their clients' demands.

These are a few places where you probably come across AI often:

  • Navigation and maps apps

  • Facial recognition on your phone

  • Autocorrect or text editors, like Grammarly

  • Search recommendations

  • Customer service chatbots

  • E-Payments

Social media companies like Meta, which controls Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp, use artificial intelligence to take note of the kind of content you interact with. That user behavior data, or the data that reflects how you interact with content on those platforms, determines which posts and advertisements you see when using those apps. Twitter and TikTok also have robust algorithms that personalize each user's experience to the content they like to interact with, often monetizing popular content.

Some care even feature artificial intelligence components. Electric vehicle companies are using AI to experiment with range anxiety solutions in EV engines and batteries. And any cars that have self-parking features use AI along with lidar and radar to "see" the environment around them.

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Are Florida-based companies and entities using artificial intelligence?

  • Healthcare companies - UF Health has announced a new AI initiative to incorporate artificial intelligence throughout its patient care and intensive care units. UF Health is planning to use AI to aggregate patient data to assist physicians' decision-making process and improve patient experience by leveraging it to make predictions of potential postoperative complications before they happen and directly applying those predictions to patient care.

  • Law enforcement - Most Florida police agencies use artificial intelligence for facial recognition. Police officers in Pinellas county have used AI for facial recognition since 2001, when it started managing the Face Analysis Comparison and Examination System (FACES). This has been a sore spot for some, who suspect facial recognition technology has been used for identifying and reprimanding peaceful protestors throughout the state over the last few years.

  • Colleges and universities - Boca Raton-based Florida Atlantic University (FAU) is one of the many universities incorporating artificial intelligence into its research and education methods. "AI has three main components, sensing, computing and connectivity," the university's website says. "FAU is incorporating all of these into engineering, medical and other areas of research and education."

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Which AI companies are based in Florida? What do they do?

Miami has become a hotbed for AI startups within the last few years. Here are three notable artificial intelligence-based startups to emerge from the slew of AI startups springing out of South Florida.

  • Heru - This Miami-based AI startup makes software for real-time medical diagnostic devices. Its most notable contribution is wearable hardware that connects to the company's cloud-based software and evaluates vision disorders in a patient in real time. The company has pulled in almost $33 million in funding since it was founded in 2018.

  • Kairos - This facial recognition software startup was founded in Miami in 2012. Kairos uses detection, identification, verification and 2-D to 3-D modeling for different platforms like Javascript, PHP, Ruby, iOS, Android to detect things like gender and age. It also uses programming for detecting emotion and attention during facial recognition processes.

  • Finally - This startup, founded in 2018, helps small-to-medium-sized businesses automate their bookkeeping in areas like accounting and finance. The company offers solutions for payroll and invoice management, tax filing, cash flow and bill pay management and financial reports. The startup has raked in a whopping $99.1 million in funding, according to Crunchbase.

Lianna Norman covers trending news in Palm Beach County for The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at lnorman@pbpost.com. You can follow her reporting on social media@LiannaNorman on Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Florida companies using artificial intelligence and how AI fits in