Announcing the winners of VentureBeat’s 6th Annual AI Innovation Awards

Capping the second day featuring insights from enterprise AI and data leaders during VB Transform 2024 in San Francisco, VentureBeat announced the winners of the sixth annual AI Innovation Awards. 

The awards recognized enterprise implementation, innovation, startup promise and visionary and inclusivity initiatives in generative AI. Nine awards were given in five categories: Generative AI Innovator of the Year, Best Enterprise Implementation of Generative AI, Most Promising Generative AI Startup, Generative AI Visionary, Generative AI Diversity and Inclusion and Generative AI Open Source Contribution.

The nominees and winners were drawn from our daily editorial coverage and the expertise, knowledge and experience of our nominating committee members.

Thank you to our nominating committee members for their guidance, insights and recommendations: 

Jonathan Frankle, Chief Scientist for neural networks at Databricks

Diya Wynn, Responsible AI lead at AWS. 

Tonya Custis, Senior Director of AI research at Autodesk

Prem Natarajan, Chief Scientist and head of enterprise AI at Capital One

Kalyan Veeramachaneni, Principal Research Scientist at MIT College of Computing

And the winners are: 

This award goes to the company that has pushed the boundaries of gen AI the furthest in the past year and demonstrated the most innovative use of the technology.

Our winner is OpenAI. The startup has quickly claimed the center of attention in the tech world, captivating both industry insiders and the general public with its groundbreaking AI innovations. From the viral success of ChatGPT to the anticipation surrounding each new model release, OpenAI has masterfully kept the spotlight on gen AI. Their rapid-fire advancements, including GPT-3, GPT-4, and DALL-E, have not only showcased the potential of AI but have also sparked global conversations about its implications. With the recent announcement of GPT-4o (GPT-4 Omni), OpenAI continues to command headlines and steer the narrative of AI’s future, cementing its role as the company everyone’s watching in the AI revolution.

This award highlights the top enterprise company that has implemented gen AI technology in a truly transformative way.

Our winner is Microsoft. The tech giant has been working on incorporating gen AI into its Dynamics and Power platforms to enable enterprise applications with the power of gen AI. The company has also deployed its Copilot gen AI assistant across the Microsoft 365 suite of business productivity and collaboration apps. In May, the company announced that Microsoft Copilot Studio will let developers build AI bots that act like agents. In June, the company’s Azure AI team dropped a new vision model called Florence-2 on Hugging Face.

Colette Stallbaumer, WorkLab co-founder and Copilot GM at Microsoft, was a speaker at Transform. She accepted the award in a video earlier in the day.

“I’m honored that VentureBeat is recognizing Microsoft for best enterprise and implementation. It’s been an incredible year and I’m thrilled that our customers are seeing the value of Copilot in the enterprise. I’m honored to accept this award on behalf of Microsoft and the incredible team behind Copilot. Thank you.”

Our winner is Patronus AI. The company is focused on AI evaluation and security, particularly for large language models (LLMs). As more tech companies release models capable of seeing, hearing and injecting emotion into interactions, it makes it difficult to keep up with accuracy, privacy and auditing needs. Patronus AI aims to address these challenges and has launched “FinanceBench” benchmarks, datasets and diagnostics to help in areas like detecting personally identifiable information (PII) in bot information. In May, the company raised $17 million in a series A funding, bringing its total funding to $20 million.

The Patronous AI team could not be at the conference to accept the award in person; however, Anand Kannappan, co-founder and CEO, did send in an acceptance video.

Kannappan said the company was thrilled to be receiving the award.

“We help companies scale, we catch failures to tell their systems…we launched the patch late last year to help financial services companies and test their systems,” he said. “It has since been widely adopted as a standard by financial institutions. We are so proud of this recognition from VentureBeat and we’re really thrilled about what’s coming next in 2024 and beyond.”

Our winner is Abridge. The company offers an AI-powered platform built for medical conversations and improving clinical documentation. The company’s technology transforms patient-clinician conversations into structured clinical notes in real-time with deep electronic medical records integrations. In February the company announced a $150 million series C round, just four months after a $30 million series B round. The company also announced a new enterprise agreement with Yale New Haven Health System, to reduce the mental load of clinical documentation to focus on patient care.

Abridge CTO/CSO Zack Lipton accepted the award for the company at VB Transform. He talked about how the company is working to remove the administrative friction that medical professionals face.

“Already in the last year we’ve gone from a single pilot to the leading system deployed in over 50 hospital systems across the country,” said Lipton. The hope is to save doctors and medical professionals valuable time, he added.

“Every day we hear from doctors who are able to get home earlier, take lunch breaks for the first time in 10 years and spend time with their families in the evening,” said Lipton. “We’re saving doctors hours per day and we’re just getting started.”

Our winners are ServiceNow and Hugging Face. StarCoder, a new LLM, part of the BigCode Project, a joint effort of ServiceNow and Hugging Face, launched in May. This is part of an effort to build out an open community around code generation tools for AI.

ServiceNow’s Sampada Chavan, an AI senior principal product manager, accepted the award at VB Transform.

“There are two main things that I want to highlight,” Chavan said. “One, is we truly tap into the virtuous cycle of open innovation because this is where the community came together to build the model according to the data and that will give it back to the committed community as well.” The second part, she added, is having open, transparent information about the models.

“And this is going to help us with the generative AI as well as responsive, responsible AI at scale,” she said.

This award goes to the most promising startup that has developed an innovative gen AI application and demonstrated high growth potential.

Our winner is Lamini. The startup offers a platform for AI model development and deployment and recently announced findings that its fine-tuning reduces hallucinations by 90%. The company was founded in 2022 and aims to simplify the process of creating, fine-tuning and deploying custom LLMs for businesses. Lamini’s platform focuses on enabling model training on proprietary data while addressing privacy concerns and computational efficiency.

Greg Diamos, CTO and co-founder of Lamini, accepted the award at Transform.

“It’s been a real journey to get here to be able to create this company,” he said. “I think our mission is that every single enterprise can have access to generative AI. He added that it was an honor for the company to receive the award.

This award honors an individual who has made significant contributions to the field of gen AI through their thought leadership, research or work building foundational technologies.

John Pasmore is the founder and CEO of Latimer, an LLM designed with deep empathy and a commitment to reducing bias. Latimer understands the nuances of diverse voices and narratives and leverages a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) model architecture to ensure every response is grounded in the most accurate and comprehensive data available.

Pasmore accepted his award at Transform, saying: “It’s an incredible honor. We’re a very young company. We started last July and launched our product in January of this year, with the sole goal of making AI as inclusive as possible. So we’ve built a built-in model that we hope everybody uses. We’ve seen tremendous adoption, we’re working with a bunch of colleges and universities.”

This award recognizes the company, organization or individual that has done the most to promote diversity and inclusion in the gen AI field. This could include advancing AI ethics, making AI technologies more accessible, providing opportunities and support for underrepresented groups or using AI in a way that reduces bias and promotes social justice.

Maryam Rezapoor works on product development for Amazon AGI. She built the AWS AI and ML Scholarship, in collaboration with Intel and Udacity, from concept to creation to provide high school and college students from underserved and underrepresented communities with resources to start their careers in AI and ML globally. (Disclosure: One of our nominating committee members works for AWS)

Rezapoor accepted her award at VB Transform. She thanked her team and leadership at AWS.

“The journey of building this product and program was filled with determination and reflection for me,” Rezapoor said. “As somebody from Iran, the experience of navigating a new culture shaped my perspective. I vividly remember the time that I totally recognized the value and the power of diversity. Being in a room with people from different walks of life. I realized firsthand how a vision can transform into something extraordinary with people of diverse backgrounds.”

“So I’m really hopeful for future data ideas and creators that are as diverse as the world,” she added.

This award highlights the person, team or company that has made the most significant contribution to open-source tools, datasets or other resources to help advance gen AI.

Our winner is Hugging Face. This leading AI company and platform provides a comprehensive ecosystem for machine learning (ML) practitioners, researchers and developers. Hugging Face is renowned for its significant open-source contributions to the ML community, particularly in advancing natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV) technologies. Hugging Face’s platform has become a go-to resource for AI practitioners, fostering innovation and knowledge sharing in the field.

Congratulations to all our winners and nominees.