Sultan Mahmood is the Global Financial Services leader of artificial intelligence and robotics at PwC. He also leads the development of PwC UK's AI solutions and advises clients across many industries on identifying and delivering business results enabled by disruptive technologies such as AI and robotics. Mahmood was a panelist at the recent Fortune CEO Series event, held at Salesforce's London World Tour. We spent time talking with him about artificial intelligence and the future of work. Salesforce: Artificial intelligence (AI) is a powerful new technology with the capacity to impact on business processes across the organization.

HANGZHOU, CHINA - JANUARY 16: Alibaba employees watch an artificial intelligence robot named ET writing Spring Festival couplets at Alibaba's Xixi District on January 16, 2017 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province of China. The robot named ET writes exclusive Spring Festival couplets for each Alibaba employee after using face recognition technology and speech recognition technology. The buzzword among the business and tech communities in China for the past year has been'AI', or artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence, which allows software to "learn" human ways of thinking, is being incorporated into the largest e-commerce platforms, including Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, as well as into data-intensive traditional sectors. With strong government backing and concentrated research in this area, AI is poised to drive China's economy forward toward higher levels of growth.

Though last Sunday's Tokyo assembly elections garnered the most media attention, another contest came in a close second, even if only two people were involved. Fourteen-year-old Sota Fujii's record-setting winning streak of 29 games of shogi was finally broken on July 2 when he lost a match to 22-year-old Yuki Sasaki. Fujii has turned into a media superstar in the past year because of his youth and exceptional ability in a game that non-enthusiasts may find too cerebral to appreciate. The speed of Fujii's ascension to headline status has been purposely accelerated by the media, which treats him as not just a prodigy, but as the vanguard figure of a pastime in which the media has a stake. Press photos of Fujii's matches show enormous assemblies of reporters, video crews and photographers hovering over the kneeling opponents.

Big data is a big deal. The full launch of the English version of Samsung's Bixby voice control interface for the Galaxy S8 is still in a holding pattern, after originally expecting to launch in June. The delay comes from a handful of issues with the service but is driven by a lack of usage data that's ultimately required for the machine learning systems to work at their full potential. Although the service is already available in Samsung's home country of South Korea, evolving Bixby for use with U.S. English is proving tougher. Because of the vast number of potential commands and numerous pathways to accomplish those commands within the interface and apps on a phone, the only realistic way to make it all work is for machine learning algorithms to process large amounts of data and determine those links automatically. Samsung's engineers can of course set them on the right path, but in the end, you need real-world usage data to show the algorithms how people are using the service and how to best accomplish the commands.

President Donald Trump reportedly spends his nights alone in the White House, watching TV news and yelling at the screen. He wakes up early each morning to watch more television and tweet his anger to the world … or Mika Brzezinski … or CNN. He takes time out of meetings with foreign leaders to brag about his Electoral College win. That all sounds, at the very least, distracting for a person with the weight of the free world on his shoulders. But if his fury at the Russia scandal and insecurity about his election are stealing time from the important decisions of the presidency, Trump is by no means the first commander in chief whose emotions or personality have gotten in the way of the job.

In the quarter century since Volvo rolled my ruby-red 240 wagon off an assembly line, its creator has gone from a modest Swedish independent automaker to part of a massive American conglomerate to an arm of a Chinese automaker that's pushing driverless cars and racing to go fully electric in the next two years. It's been a funky journey for a funky automaker, but it's no mere aberration or footnote. If you want to understand the car industry of the past 25 years--and maybe the next 25--study Volvo's journey. For a niche player best known for shuttling liberals and hippies, Volvo has long played an outsized role in the evolution of the auto industry. It invented and made standard the three-point seat belt.

You don't have to be a data scientist to be fascinated by the world of machine learning, but a few travel guides might help you navigate the vast universe that also includes big data, artificial intelligence, and deep learning, along with a large dose of statistics and analytics. In this article, I'll look at three of the most popular machine learning libraries for Python. Released nearly a decade ago and primarily developed by a machine learning group at Université de Montréal, Theano is one of the most-used CPU and GPU mathematical compilers in the machine learning community. A 2016 paper, Theano: A Python framework for fast computation of mathematical expressions, provides a thorough overview of the library. "Several software packages have been developed to build on the strengths of Theano, with a higher-level user interface, more suitable for certain goals," the paper explains.

Bigger than electricity, bigger than the internet, experts say. AI is already omnipresent in our everyday lives: When Netflix recommends you should watch Jane the Virgin and Silicon Valley (Any ressemblances to what I really watch on Netflix is a coincidence.), Your vacuum cleaner is powered by AI. And if you live in China, even your toilet paper dispenser runs on AI! In the workplace, artificial intelligence is evolving into intelligent assistants to help us work smarter, but also into drones that deliver the things we order on Amazon and of course into self driving vehicles (today, planes are mostly flown by AI already).

A young Marine reaches out for a hand-launched drone. In science fiction and real life alike, there are plenty of horror stories where humans trust artificial intelligence too much. They range from letting the fictional SkyNet control our nuclear weapons to letting Patriots shoot down friendly planes or letting Tesla Autopilot crash into a truck. As conflict on earth, in space, and in cyberspace becomes increasingly fast-paced and complex, the Pentagon's Third Offset initiative is counting on artificial intelligence to help commanders, combatants, and analysts chart a course through chaos -- what we've dubbed the War Algorithm (click here for the full series). But if the software itself is too complex, too opaque, or too unpredictable for its users to understand, they'll just turn it off and do things manually.

The little Echo Dot sitting calmly next to my bed never ceases to surprise the futurist in me. I use it for mundane daily tasks like setting alarms and not so mundane tasks like ten minute meditations and listening to the sounds of a babbling brook while easing in to a deep sleep. Its a very interesting product and I wanted to dig deeper and analyze its strategic value to Amazon and explore how transformative it could be to our daily lives. In this essay I hope to present my analysis with some facts, assumptions and hypotheses. To understand why Alexa is such a big deal its important for us to dive deep in to Amazon's core revenue drivers and its overall business model.