Deloitte Global expects the three main benefits for Venture capital (VC) firms are active in this space too. software companies that have integrated cognitive Since 2011, most VC funding of start-ups developing technologies into their products will be: or applying cognitive technologies has benefited companies building applications for traditional enterprise Improving core functionality – Cognitive technologies functions such as marketing and sales. US-based start- will be used to improve the performance of existing ups like these have raised nearly $2.5 billion since 2011, software by doing the same things, only better. For suggesting that the biggest near-term opportunity for example, one US-based company providing retail cognitive technologies is in using them to enhance solutions uses machine learning to reduce false positives 119 current business practices . For instance, 113 when identifying fraudulent transactions . Previous a company called Convirza raised $25 million to develop software solutions already identified fraud, but machine and commercialize a call marketing optimization learning allows the retailer to do so with greater accuracy, platform that uses speech recognition technology and potentially resulting in fewer legitimate transactions being sophisticated algorithms to gauge lead quality, measure incorrectly flagged. A Silicon Valley networking company customer conversions, analyze phone performance, uses a cloud-based Cognitive Threat Analytics program and take action with workflow-based marketing that relies on advanced statistical modeling and machine 120 automation . learning to independently identify new web security 114 threats, learn from what it sees, and adapt over time . Another target for venture investors is vertical specific software vendors. Such companies have received over Generating new insights – Machine learning and 121 $2 billion from venture investors since 2011 . One other advanced analytical technologies will likely make example is Wellframe, which received $1.5 million in it possible to uncover previously inaccessible insights seed funding for its mobile app that connects healthcare that were hidden in large data sets or obscured by the providers and patients once they return home from the unstructured format of the data. One US database hospital, creating a daily to-do list for the patients with company’s cloud service leverages NLP technology to items such as medication reminders and questionnaires determine and assign an ‘emotional’ rating to customer about symptoms. Wellframe’s machine learning survey responses that fit a customer sentiment category, engine tailors the app’s content based on answers and 115 which helps companies take immediate action . care regimens prescribed by the patient’s healthcare 122 provider . Automation – Cognitive technologies make it possible to automate tasks formerly done by people. One medical The growth in enterprise software use of cognitive software company uses an NLP engine to interpret technologies has been partly driven by the shift toward doctors’ free-text notes and extracts key data such as cloud computing. Only a subset of users of enterprise 116 allergies, medications and diagnoses . A business software would historically have had the scale to deploy services company streamlined a standardized business the on-premise technologies capable of doing advanced process: their cross-border e-commerce platform machine learning, for example. But the growth in cloud employs a natural language processing engine and computing could allow enterprise software vendors machine learning algorithms to accurately deliver and to provide the benefits of machine learning to all their continuously improve product classifications as more 123 clients . Further growth in cognitive technologies is 117 transactions are processed . likely to be accelerated by the trend toward open source AI: one of the largest players in the space open-sourced Some business software companies have developed 124 the software engine behind their deep learning tools , AI capabilities in-house, but many others are acquiring and another open-sourced the designs for the servers capability through M&A, and we expect this to 125 that run their AI algorithms . continue in 2016. Indeed more than 100 mergers and acquisitions involving cognitive technology companies 118 have taken place since 2012 . 18