Moderator: Jennifer Baker / Journalist based in Brussels specialising in EU policy and legislation in the technology sector.

Stunning images have revealed Audi's vision for a self-driving taxi that will pick you up and drop you off from anywhere, by both land and air. Called Pop.Up Next, the modular system consists of a two-seater capsule that works as a car while on the road or that can be carried to the rider's destination by an airborne drone when traffic is congested. The Pop.Up concept was first launched by Airbus and the German auto firm has now unveiled its unique spin on this entirely electric, fully automatic modular design. Audi says the concept could become an industry standard for flying taxis in the future it believes it could become a reality sometime between 2024 and 2027. Stunning images have revealed Audi's vision for a part-car, part-drone vehicle that will pick you up and drop you off anywhere that could be with us within the next six years.

Across the globe, energy systems are changing and creating unprecedented challenges for the organisations tasked with ensuring the lights stay on. In the UK, National Grid is facing shrinking margins, looming capacity shortages and unpredictable peaks and troughs in energy supply caused by increasing levels of renewable penetration. At the recent Reinventing Energy Summit, Michael Bironneau, Head of Technology Development at Open Energi, explored how the same machine learning techniques that have let machines defeat chess and Go masters, can also be leveraged to orchestrate massive amounts of flexible demand-side capacity – from industrial equipment, co-generation and battery storage systems – towards the one goal of creating a smarter grid; one that is cleaner, cheaper, more secure and more efficient. For World Cities Day 2016, Michael talked to Nikita Johnson of Re:work about utilising data science in energy, creating a smarter grid, political challenges, and more. What are the main transformative technologies that will help create a smarter grid?

In 2021 the UK government intends the country to be well on its way to a driverless future. No, not a cheap joke about Brexit -- yesterday it announced a three-year regulatory review to "pave the way for self-driving cars". This follows the budget, in November, when the government announced a tranche of funding for technology innovations -- including AI and driverless cars -- and said it wants to establish a looser framework for testing self-driving vehicles "without a safety operator" with the stated aim of getting driverless cars on the roads by 2021. The law review meshes with that goal, though the government is clearly giving itself a very tight timetable for resolving regulatory complications and passing the necessary legislation. The myriad technological challenges of ensuring autonomous vehicles can operate safety and efficiently in all weather conditions are really just one portion of the challenge here.

When thinking of AI and its involvement in politics, it's fair to assume the stereotypes are not positive. AI's influence in politics over the past few years has come under serious fire. Facebook's algorithms, for example, have been blamed for spreading of misinformation, which heavily impacted major political events such as Brexit and the 2016 US election.

AI has been identified as a threat to the warehouse and logistics industry, but what about retail workers? A new report from Blue Yonder looks at how AI could support rather than replace human retail workers. A report from the Martin School at the University of Oxford and Citi estimated that, while perhaps unsurprisingly 80 per cent of retail transportation, warehousing and logistics jobs are at risk due to automation and artificial intelligence, 63 per cent of sales positions are also under threat. Uwe Weiss, CEO at Blue Yonder, argues that removing sales staff from the shop floor to be replaced by AI would be the wrong approach for retailers, as they should be enabling their employees to do what they do best, providing friendly, responsive and bespoke customer service, and letting the machines take care of the manual time-consuming processes, such as replenishment, that require analysis of vast quantities of data and keep staff away from delivering good customer service. For decades, large-scale retail companies have used manual processes to anticipate consumer demand, and stock replenishment has often been based on gut feeling, assumptions, existing agreements with wholesalers and expectations that are hard to measure.

Robots may one day replace human crop pickers in the UK in light of a decline in the seasonal labor market. GummiArm, a soft robot capable of crop picking, is the brainchild of researchers from the University of Plymouth. Academics from the institution and producers from Cornwall have worked together to create robots which could work alongside existing employees in the crop picking industry through the Automated Brassica harvest in Cornwall (ABC) project. The aim of the project is to develop "cutting-edge technology to help with the cauliflower harvest and potentially other fieldwork operations." The GummiArm was born from this need, especially in light of labor market fluctuations following the decision on Brexit. The UK relies on migrant labor during the picking season, and over the course of the last year, there has been a 29 percent decline in worker volumes with thousands of vacancies being left unfilled.

A top bishop in the Church of England issued his "Ten Commandments of artificial intelligence," during a major policy debate in London last week, based on the importance of trust and ethics in the evolving technology. The Rt. Rev. Steven Croft, the Lord Bishop of Oxford who is a member of the House of Lords Select Committee on artificial intelligence, spoke last week at the Westminster eForum Keynote Seminar, artificial intelligence and Robotics: Innovation, Funding and Policy Priorities. Croft came up with a 10-point plan following a debate on trust, ethics, and cybersecurity, the Internet of Business website reported, which he presented before government, academics and business representatives from around the world. The so-called "10 Commandments of AI" begin with the call for AI to be "designed for all, and benefit humanity." "AI should operate on principles of transparency and fairness, and be well signposted," the list continues.

On May 20, 2017, Tom Haak of the HR Trend Institute, gave a presentation at the HR Innovation Day 2017, in Leipzig. The title of his presentation was: "Artificial Intelligence: threat or opportunity for HRM". His presentation was recorded, and the video can be found here. Tom Haak is the founder and director of The HR Trend Institute. Prior to founding the HR Trend Institute in 2014, Tom held senior HR positions in companies as Arcadis, Aon, KPMG and Philips.

AI platform Globality is giving small and medium businesses access to broader opportunities. In a post-Brexit, "America First" world, protectionism seems to be back in fashion, and globalization has become something of a dirty word. Since the 1990s, global trade has helped lift over a billion people out of poverty, driven sustained economic growth, lowered consumer prices, and delivered unprecedented freedoms to much of the world's population. Still, middle-income earners have seen their living standards stagnate, while many of the great leaps forward in automation are destroying the jobs of those least able to cope, with vastly greater levels of disruption feared. Large multinational companies still seem to be the greatest beneficiaries of a globalized marketplace. Small and medium-sized businesses, which constitute the bulk of the world's economy and drive most job creation, find it more difficult to make valuable connections that can lead to international trade opportunities and contracts with large organizations.