The best of exceptional lab-to-live solutions, industry applications and pilot projects in AI win top recognition

Dubai, May 2, 2019:  At the inaugural Ai Everything Brave Awards in association with Forbes AI, frontrunners from homegrown businesses and global industry showcased how artificial intelligence is transforming their operations and scale, to drive new efficiencies, elevate customer experiences and pave the way for an innovation centric economy. 

From exceptional lab-to-live solutions, industry applications and pilot projects in AI, the finalists gave visitors from around the world a glimpse into the future of business. With more than 60 entries from 15 countries, today’s announcement recognised the 15 most deserving finalists, 9 of which were awarded for their outstanding pioneering achievement. The awards highlighted the innovation and acknowledged the ingenuity and accomplishments of the finalist companies shaping the field of Artificial Intelligence and reimagining our future. 

William Thompson, Publisher at Forbes AI, said “We at Forbes are very pleased to collaborate with the Dubai World Trade Centre and the UAE Ministry of Artificial Intelligence in creating the AI BRAVE awards. We are thrilled and excited about the crop of young companies and transforming regional giants, who are leading the charge on AI in the Middle East. Unfortunately, we could only honour a few of the deserving companies that applied. Our congratulations go out to our esteemed winners.”

Rashid Al Ghurair, CEO of Mena Energy and Founder of CAFU, said: “It has been a great honour to have won the first BRAVE Awards; we couldn’t have been able to reach this far without the vision of our leadership that aims at making Dubai a truly forward-thinking city. I would also like to dedicate this award to the immensely talented people at CAFU, working rigorously to make CAFU one of the most advanced platforms in the globe.”

UAE based Alef Education was recognised for best AI application in Education. Alef is revolutionising education by using AI to create tailored and personalised learning experiences without traditional tools, books or white boards. By extracting and analysing data and efficiently determining each child’s strengths, this Brave Award winner is effectively creating optimal learning paths for individual students with it’s cutting edge platform. 

Icertis won best AI application for Contract Management. As technology partner to the world’s most broad-based healthcare companies, Icertis leverages AI effectively in end-to-end contract management services and systems with impressive results. Being four times faster in contract services than traditional mechanisms, the company helps save hundreds and millions of dollars in the process. This includes reducing negotiating time from 35 %– 40%, as well as the time between a contract being requested and executed with up to 10 days. 

Pony.ai was recognised for best AI application in Mobility. The company is on a mission to revolutionise the future of transportation through solutions that integrate AI into everyday autonomous driving systems. In 2018, it raised $214 million and provided 18,000 autonomous accident free driven rides on public roads in the same. The overwhelmingly successful results have resulted in China’s first public autonomous ride hailing service. 

The Abu Dhabi Police were recognised for best application in Road Safety, with an exceptional software that leverages AI to recommend corrective actions to motorists. Using AI to understand a driver’s behaviour in order to improve it, the AD Police are now working with other regulators to fulfil their mission to ultimately eliminate road fatalities by 2030. 

One of the first entrants into the UAE’s AI ecosystem, Emirates NBD was recognised for best AI application in Banking and Finance. Emirates NBD has led with the the first MENA Arabic and English natural voice recognition enabled virtual assistant dubbed EVA. This has resulted in a significant increase in customer satisfaction via their customer hotline. 

SoundHound a global audio and speech recognition company, won the award for Automotive Voice Assistant. The cloud based and embedded conversational voice interface dubbed the Siri for cars is used by a number of leading companies, such as Mercedes bens, Pandora, and Honda. Its independent and platform agnostic interface works across Android, Windows, Unix and more operating systems. 

Founded by an Emirati entrepreneur, the Dubai based CAFU won the best AI application award in Energy. Transforming a traditional sector, with on-demand fuel services, CAFU is disrupting the retail energy sector with deep learning algorithms and real time improvement using reinforcement learning. Their AI powered fleet scheduling and routing system has decreased their delivery cost by an impressive 28% and minimised the time needed for each truck to reach a customer and fulfil orders. 

The revolutionary Brainco was recognised in the Health and Fitness category. This innovative sensor-laden head band and AI powered analytics program captures and studies hundreds of variables of brain activity ranging from metastases of focus, contemplation and relaxation. With 95% deductive accuracy – their work is being employed to improve student learning outcomes as well as Olympic athletes to hone their focus and self-regulation skills.

AI is also powering the GCC’s largest telecommunications corporation, Etisalat, who were recognised for best AI application in Customer Engagement.  This company’s proactive customer complaint management uses machine learning algorithms to reduce the amount of received complain calls by 9%. It is empowering and encouraging people to explore and deploy models using open-source libraries. 

Ai Everything is hosted by the UAE’s National Program for Artificial Intelligence with the support of global association partners International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), in strategic partnership with Smart Dubai.