Join Malcolm Frank, Cognizant EVP of Strategy, Paul Roehrig, VP of Cognizant Digital Business, and Ben Pring, VP and Director of the Cognizant Center for the Future of Work as they discuss the top technology item at The World Economic Forum 2017 in Davos, Switzerland: AI, automation and the impact of new machines on business and society. Hear their actionable advice and prescriptions for getting AHEAD in the new digital machine age, culled from their upcoming book, What to do When Machines Do Everything (John Wiley & Sons). Learn where AI is already impacting business and how to create practical and actionable plans that embed new machines into your organization's fabric to augment human capabilities and extend productivity.

Industrial design in mobile phones is at its striking best. The current crop of announcements at this year's Mobile World Congress are testament to this: the solid, clean look of the Nokia 6, the simple but elongated shape of the LG G6 and the eye-popping colours of Huawei's P10. But perhaps the most attractive design of the lot is Sony's Xperia XZ Premium. It modifies the already-elegant look of last autumn's Xperia XZ, building on the distinctive curved edges and flat base and top (hey, it even stands up on its own!) but only gently. This new phone is bigger thanks to the 5.5-inch display on board.

If you've been waiting for Google to bring its smart Home speaker to the UK, you may only have to hang on a little bit longer. A Google spokesperson confirmed to Engadget today that the contoured cylinder will make its journey across the Atlantic in the second quarter of this year, giving the Amazon Echo some much-needed competition in the process. Details are scarce right now but Rick Osterloh, Google's SVP of Hardware, told BBC reporter Rory Cellan-Jones that he believes the Home's "AI skills and vast data" will give it the edge over its rival. The Echo has been on sale in the UK since September 2016 and has already gained support from various local apps and services, which may put it slightly ahead of Google's offering at launch. As for release date and price, Google will provide more information in the near future.

As the calendar turned to January, banks rolled out new ways for both commercial and corporate banking clients to conduct business by tapping the potential of several new financial innovations. These new tools, powered by artificial intelligence, greater integration with social media platforms and a digital-first approach to lending, are giving smaller financial institutions more weapons to battle their big banking competition. Banks have also brought these technological advancements to new features designed to help consumers keep their New Year's resolutions by living healthier financial lives. Several financial institutions last month rolled out new tools to help consumers monitor and control their spending or send money to and from any corner of the globe. Banking has not always been a digital concept, but based on how they're approaching recent tech developments, financial institutions are clearly becoming more comfortable in their digital skin. Kasisto and Varo Money Inc. launched a new app-based chatbot that aims to offer consumers personalized insights into their spending.

Mobile World Congress 2017 -- Telef--nica has taken a bold leap into the age of artificial intelligence with its launch today of a new digital assistant called Aura, which appears to be the product of a two-year research initiative at the Spanish telco that has been a closely guarded secret. Unveiled in Barcelona on the cusp of this year's Mobile World Congress, Aura sounds and works much like Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL)'s Siri or Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN)'s Alexa, allowing customers to check on details of their Telef--nica service -- and ask for problems to be resolved or new features to be provided -- using a voice interface on a mobile device. Judging by the demonstration at Telef--nica's offices in Barcelona, Aura works at least as effectively as the digital assistants developed by the web giants but differs in one important respect: It stores and can act upon all of the information about a particular user that is relevant to his or her relationship with the operator. In fact, Telef--nica balks at the "digital assistant" label, preferring to think of Aura as a "cognitive intelligence" system than a neat bit of voice-recognition software.

Current research projects show that artificial intelligence (AI) can help us solving global problems for the greater good of mankind. Despite the headlines presenting crashes involving self-driving cars, the applications of AI technology in this area could dramatically reduce injuries and deaths on the roads. Self-driving cars could also change our lifestyles. Thanks to this emerging technology, we will have more time to entertain ourselves of work during commutes. The decreased cognitive load and the increased comfort provided by shared transportation and self-driving may also affect where people choose to live.

Universities will get £17m to help them develop pioneering robotics and AI as part of the plans to support the'booming' sector, which is behind smartphone voice and touch recognition technology and digital assistants such as the iPhone's Siri. AI also forms the bedrock of video games and music and film recommendations services, as well as improving online customer services, and is used in fraud detection tools used by banks. Among the projects supported with the money from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is a move by the University of Manchester to develop autonomous robots for hazardous environments such as nuclear facilities. Researchers at Imperial College London will use some of the funds to try and make advances in the field of surgical micro-robotics. A major review of AI will also be carried out by Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and BenevolentTech chief executive Jerome Pesenti.

Amdocs,a provider of software and services to communications and media companies, says that it will focus on how three strategic areas at the Mobile World Congress– real-time intelligence, open-source virtualization, and IT modernization – which will drive communications service providers' digital transformation journeys and enrich their customers' experience. The company will also demonstrate a range of virtualized network services from its network functions virtualization (NFV) partners, building on its NFV leadership. Amdocs is a founding platinum member of the Linux Foundation's just-announced Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP) project, which will merge the open-source ECOMP and OPEN-O initiatives; Amdocs is co-creator of A&T's ECOMP (Enhanced Control, Orchestration, Management & Policy) platform. Amdocs has announced it is already working with Orange Polska to deploy open-source software modules in a live cloud environment, and is ready to lend its expertise to other service providers to develop easily configurable and scalable software-based networks and virtual services. Benefits include accurate and rapid proposal generation, increased revenues and fast time-to-market for new offers.

SoftBank chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son reacts as SoftBank's human-like robots named "Pepper" performs. Singularity -- the point when machine intelligence surpasses our own and goes on to improve itself at an exponential rate -- will happen by 2047, according to Masayoshi Son, the Japanese tech mogul leading SoftBank. Son was speaking on Monday at the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona, Spain. He said: "I totally believe this concept. In next 30 years this will become a reality."

Stand aside Asimov, in the real world, we need real laws to manage advances in artificially intelligent robots. I've been talking about this for a while now and I'm quite happy to see that governments, who are typically very slow in acting on technology, are actually taking decisions before AI enabled robots and software become truly able to learn and go beyond their own programming. This is likely a reaction to the upcoming movement in the car industry (BMW, Ford, Chinese transportation drone companies, etc...) to put millions of self-driven cars and drones on the streets around the world on or about the year 2020 (3 years from now). There is obvious fear about how people will react when the first self-driven car will occur or when the first AI enabled industrial machine hurts someone. What happens when people panic because the economy can't sustain itself with too many efficient AI's doing a better job than any human can, taking their place in the world?