IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) yesterday announced a global strategic partnership to deliver joint solutions designed to leverage artificial intelligence and enable companies to make smarter decisions, faster than ever before. With the partnership, IBM Watson, the leading AI platform for business, and Salesforce Einstein, AI that powers the world's #1 CRM, will seamlessly connect to enable an entirely new level of intelligent customer engagement across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more. IBM is also strategically investing in its Global Business Services capabilities for Salesforce with a new practice to help clients rapidly deploy the combined IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein capabilities. The partnership will bring new insights from Watson directly into the Salesforce Intelligent Customer Success Platform, combining deep customer insights from Salesforce Einstein with Watson's structured and unstructured data across many sources and industries including weather, healthcare, financial services and retail. Together, Watson and Einstein will ingest, reason over and derive recommendations to accelerate decision making and drive greater customer success.

We must recognize that our cyberdefense technologies are not working and will not work. Cases in point: Our most sensitive cyberoffense technologies have been hacked; power companies admit they would have great difficulty stopping a cyberattack and are being asked to be prepared to operate at much less than full capacity under a cyberattack; 70 percent of oil and gas companies have been attacked -- and the threat is growing. The cybersecurity industry is in chaos and needs to move toward new technologies -- cyberdefense technologies that are beginning to leverage analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI). Hackers are taking advantage of the same technologies, so the cyberdefense industry needs to jump on board. Let's quit playing catch-up and instead take a proactive approach to cybersecurity.

There is growing demand for more flexibility in factories and shops. Collaborative robotics, a sub-set of service robotics in labs, manufacturing and material handling, is where the action is today because co-bots are meeting these new demands, while caged legacy robots are not. Service and assistance robotics, with and without mobility, are an emerging and somewhat futuristic field, albeit one which is developing rapidly. Vision and tactile sensors, safety features, mobility, and simple, fast and intuitive robot training, are all playing important roles in many application areas. As robots can be trusted to safely work alongside humans and are relatively portable and easy to program, business managers, from all sized companies, begin to imagine uses within their labs, facilities, factories and shops – uses where robots and humans collaboratively work together to improve productivity and efficiency by using the robot where it is better than its human partners, and vice versa.

Facebook has announced that Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey is leaving the company. The 24-year-old has kept an extremely low profile after it emerged last year that he had been funding a secret meme factory called Nimble America, to support Donald Trump's presidential bid. The group was revealed on Reddit's "The Donald" forum last September, alongside posts from a user called NimbleRichMan. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) are dominating insurtech start-up spending according to a report from research firm Accenture. The report, titled "The Rise of InsurTech", said AI and IoT now account for almost half of total investment in insurance technology (insurtech) startups globally. "We've seen a rapid acceleration of investment into and deal activity around intelligent automation and IoT start-ups over the last 12 months," said co-author of the report and Accenture's digital & innovation lead in the company's financial services practice in the UK and Ireland, Roy Jubraj. The research, which includes new analysis of CB Insights data on 450 insurtech deals over the last three years, found deals based on AI and IoT rose by 79 per cent last year. Even though the two technologies represented only one-quarter (24 per cent) of the 216 insurtech deals globally last year, they accounted for 44 per cent or US$711 million of total insurtech investment – compared with just 10 per cent of global insurtech investment in 2015.

On this last day of the quarter, the stock market is so tickled with its Q1 spoils that it's about to give a bit back. That is how it usually goes when the S&P 500 is up nicely for a three-month stretch, note Bespoke Investment Group's number crunchers. They checked out how the last trading day has gone when the S&P is up at least 5% for a quarter. That final session is typically a bust, with the index retreating 0.4% on average, according to Bespoke's look at the last eight years. But who knows exactly how the S&P will close today?

SpaceX has made history by successfully launching and landing a used rocket for the first time. The California-based company launched one of its 229-foot-tall two-stage Falcon 9 rockets at 23.27 BST last night, with the aim of recovering its first-stage booster. While rocket sent a telecommunications satellite into orbit, the first-stage booster detached itself from its payload minutes after launch, righting itself and safely landing on a drone ship floating on the Atlantic Ocean. The first-stage booster, described by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk as the "most expensive part of the rocket", had previously been launched on 8 April last year. The I.F.O. is fuelled by eight electric engines, which is able to push the flying object to an estimated top speed of about 120mph.

Digital lenders are pulling in all kinds of data, like purchases, SAT scores and public records. Digital lenders are pulling in all kinds of data, like purchases, SAT scores and public records. The terms of the next loan you get might depend less on your credit score and more on what a computer program thinks of your habits. Digital lending is expected to double in size over the next three years, reaching nearly 10 percent of all loans in the U.S. and Europe. There are now some 2,000 digital startups, many of which are using artificial intelligence to analyze the troves of data created every day.

The world is going to change more over the next five years than it has over the last fifteen. That, at least, is the opinion of Jeremy Waites, who describes himself as just a lowly storyteller, traveling around to telling tales about cool stuff. Officially that makes him an evangelist, and the'cool stuff' on which he evangelises is IBM's AI system, Watson. I met up with him at the recent Cloud Expo in London to discuss some of the wider issues about where AI fits in the business and wider world, what it can bring to those parties, and what impact it might have on the way work changes – or indeed continues to exist. Like a growing number of people in the AI business Waites is keen to stress that the'A' does not stand for'Artificial', but rather for'Augmented', on the basis that the former carries with it all those scary, sci-fi connotations.

With great power comes great responsibility--and artificial-intelligence technology is getting much more powerful. Companies in the vanguard of developing and deploying machine learning and AI are now starting to talk openly about ethical challenges raised by their increasingly smart creations. "We're here at an inflection point for AI," said Eric Horvitz, managing director of Microsoft Research, at MIT Technology Review's EmTech conference this week. "We have an ethical imperative to harness AI to protect and preserve over time." Horvitz spoke alongside researchers from IBM and Google pondering similar issues.