Challenger: Tencent

Known for being the world’s largest gaming company and for WeChat, Tencent offers cloud AI services for vision, language and autoML use cases.

China-based Tencent launched its AI Lab in 2016, followed by opening an AI research center in Seattle. Its innovation, implemented solutions, consumer platforms and array of multimedia data enable Tencent to develop advanced scalable capabilities.

Tencent has more than 1,170 employees working on cloud AI developer services. Gartner ranks the company among the middle of the pack for both vision and execution.

Strength: Tencent’s YouTu Lab is one of the leading AI research centers focused on vision services and deep learning. Its image recognition function allows users to identify the specific brand, name, model or style of a product in an image and to generate the product’s price.

Weakness: Regarding its language and autoML services, Tencent focuses solely within China. It has limited language support. For example, its sentiment and text analytics services are available only in Chinese.