Satya Nadella bounded into the conference room, eager to talk about intelligence. I was at Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, WA, and the company's CEO was touting the company's progress in building more intelligent apps and services. Each morning, he told me, he puts on a HoloLens, which enables him to look at a virtual, interactive calendar projected on a wall of his house. Nadella appeared giddy as he described it. The system was intelligent, productive, and futuristic: everything he hopes Microsoft will be under his leadership.

In a rare move, the largest sports arena in Columbus, Ohio, relaxed a key policy for an event in April, allowing attendees to freely exit and reenter a game in progress. Nationwide Arena simply couldn't expect fans to stay seated for nine hours of action. It's among the accommodations event spaces across the country are making in bids to capitalize on the rise of arena-packing video-game contests, which they hope will attract a new generation of event-goers -- and with them increased ticket and concession sales. For owners, operators and concessionaires of venues, e-sports are the biggest new mass-spectator events since raves, the Ultimate Fighting Championship and the X Games. An estimated 47 million North Americans will tune into e-sports this year, according to research firm Newzoo.

SINGAPORE – More than half of workers in five Southeast Asian countries are at high risk of losing their jobs to automation in the next two decades, an International Labour Organization study found, with those in the garment industry particularly vulnerable. About 137 million workers or 56 percent of the salaried workforce from Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, fall under the high-risk category, the study showed. "Countries that compete on low-wage labor need to reposition themselves. Price advantage is no longer enough," said Deborah France-Massin, director for the ILO's bureau for employers' activities. The report said workers have to be trained to work effectively alongside digitalized machines.

She's a blast to have around. She's especially fun to shop with. That's when her bubbly, happy-go-lucky personality really comes through. Usually, we walk down an aisle – any aisle will do – and all of a sudden you can see her get excited about something she sees – a product, a sale price, whatever. I tease her that she's like a squirrel – always getting distracted by the next "shiny object". Rats do! She'll kill me if I compare her to a rat, though!)

Emerging Seattle-based fintech startup Kavout has just launched its new investment platform, driven by artificial intelligence (AI), for clients to find trading opportunities using tools powered by machine learning and big data, and with a beta-version of the platform made available to investors. As robo-advisors and automated trading products continue to emerge on the retail side, following the use of algorithmic trading and A.I.-driven technology by institutional firms, Kavout's announcement today appears to reflect the growing related interest from the market for such products. Kavout uses what it calls Kai, the core AI and machine learning process that fuels Kavout's main attributes and functions, including scanning historical SEC filings and stock quotes and examining millions of points of data ever second while analyzing stocks using an objective approach. There is also a Kai Score feature within the platform that provides a predictive analysis ranking reflecting data analytics processed for each security, and based on a stock's future performance related to its valuation, growth, momentum and other qualities. An excerpt of the platform as seen below, upon logging into the beta-version of Kavout, shows one of the Kai Score features. Commenting in an official corporate announcement, Kavout's CEO and co-founder Alex Lu said: "On Wall Street, you'll see that many hedge funds and investment banks are hiring top talent in artificial intelligence and machine learning."

At a competition in China to see who is better at recognizing faces, man or machine, Wang Yuheng, representing the humans, emerged victorious. Wang is famous in China for his photographic memory. He successfully identified a specific glass of water out of 520 seemingly identical ones in a Chinese reality TV show. He also reportedly helped police crack a case by extracting "hidden clues" from surveillance camera footage, thanks to his exceptional observational skills. But Wang's competitor, "Mark," is no less smart.

NEW YORK, July 6, 2016 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Thanks to his business acumen, poster boy looks, and relentless activism for freedom of the internet, Reddit's co-founder Alexis Ohanian has become one of the most high-profile residents of Brooklyn. A startup based in Armenia and San Francisco named 1AI Solutions has recently launched a working AI-based version of Alexis Ohanian named Avedis Ohanian. Additionally they used 3-D printing to replicate the body of Alexis Ohanian, infusing it with their proprietary Artificial Intelligence engine. "There's a lack of qualified IT professionals here in Armenia", said Dr. J.P. Hagopian, the CEO of 1AI Solutions. "We need to hire people, but we simply can't find enough good candidates. At some point our HR manager said that we should clone one of the high-performing Silicon Valley guys. She was kidding, but the idea stuck."

Financial services incumbents along with early-stage startups and large tech companies are all competing in fintech. CB Insights CEO Anand Sanwal gave a 110-slide presentation at our fintech conference in New York. The full deck covered broad VC funding trends for fintech and the developments in large categories such as wealth management, blockchain, remittance tech, and insurance tech. On robo-advisors, Sanwal noted that market volatility has not necessarily been a boon to the category. "It's not all roses," he said. "There are headwinds … When market volatility picks up, people want to talk to an advisor." At the end Sanwal highlighted 9 trends we're watching that are generating excitement. The slides for those trends are included below. If you have questions, please use the hashtag. Use it on Twitter or on the mobile app, and I'll try to get to them. Please ask me easy questions only. If you like something about the presentation, please tweet it out. If you do not like something about the presentation, please just keep it to yourself. Let me jump in and we'll go through this pretty quickly, I think. So this is what we do, take lots of data and try to predict technology trends. You've seen this join the conversation piece. We have lots of great customers, many of whom are in the room.

As financial services organisations predict and plan for the way consumers will manage their money in the future, artificial intelligence (AI) is high on the business development strategy for 2016 and beyond, says Gideon Hyde from design consultancy Market Gravity. The co-founder shares his thoughts on the emerging technology and explains how businesses can embrace AI to enhance their offerings, meet consumer demand for speed, personalisation and convenience, and launch new products and services to stand out in the competitive marketplace. AI is already around us and used every day within payments, money management and for robo-advice, particularly in the area of intelligent digital assistants that handle regular customer service enquiries and tasks. It can process'big data' far more efficiently than humans and can recognise speech, images, text, patterns of online behaviour, for example to detect fraud as well as appropriate advertisements for upselling. Smart machines and technology can turn data into customer insights and enhance service provisions, bringing the digital experience closer to the human interaction for consumers.