Data Explosion, Algorithm Economy, and the AI Fervidness

The recent surge in artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and applications across domains has brought the algorithm economy into the spotlight like never before. The chapter explored major AI-tech trends and advancements in this context, focusing on sectoral innovation diffusion and country-level AI readiness. The analysis depicts a high intensity of adoption, mainly in risk management and products and service development domains across different sectors. Here, we identified government, the economic value embedded within the tech, and the proliferation of data combined with tech advancements in the field as the core drivers of the AI hype. In the AI readiness sphere, we have observed regional and country-level disparities between the USA and Singapore from the Americas and Asia, respectively, depicting higher average readiness levels. African countries remained the laggards (except for Mauritius and South Africa, which performed relatively better in their data and infrastructural readiness), while Western European countries like the UK, Finland, and Germany, along with others, depict better preparedness. In this regard, the economic capacity with data availability and AI infrastructure of the countries showed a positive association with the countries’ AI readiness. We have also observed higher carbon footprints for countries with significant government AI readiness index (greater than 60), mainly China and the USA.