Areas in cyber security. Ex: Automating simple but highly repetitive tasks for incident responders will win you lots of friends and generate lots more opportunities if you want it.

I think applications of AI to creating 3d modeling assets for videogames. Gaming is a >100 billion dollar industry and art can be as much as half of costs for AAA games. It seems to me like it's the lowest hanging fruit of AI in terms of difficulty vs potential revenue.

A (related) example is upscaling graphics on older games using AI:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/18/18311287/ai-upscaling-alg...

https://www.reddit.com/r/GameUpscale/top/?sort=top&t=all

MS Flight Simulator 2020 seems to be doing this - creating 3D maps of all structures/trees/etc out of normal Bing world flat maps. Not sure how much human touch is required afterwards, but if those early videos are representative then damn that's amazing and brings realism never seen before

That's one example, another one is for smaller assets - trees and vegetation, for example (SpeedTree). There's definitely a market for creating 3rd party tooling to help with developing a game. There's actually quite a few companies and technologies that specialize in one aspect of a game or game's world.

There's a few other interesting technologies that add a lot of content to a game for relatively small investments; think physics and destruction engines, animation technology (iirc there is something developed by EA's sports games branch that can generate intermediate animations for smooth animation transitions), world generation (height maps), etc.

Deep learning is the obvious answer: 10 years ago it was largely confined to a small number of research groups and niche conferences.

Machine learning's hot moment was back in 2012, is there still low hanging fruit that google can't wipe out?

Enterprises. Too many people doing this on startups already. But lots of money to be done with training and consulting in the corporate world.

The behemoths don't (and can't) care about markets with a value below a certain threshold.