Like wood stacking up behind an arrowhead, Salesforce, Microsoft, Google and other tech titans are gathering behind artificial intelligence, or AI. More importantly, line-of-business executives (LOBs), the new shot-callers in tech, now expect AI to deliver real-world results, particularly in the contact center. All of this means tectonic change is coming, and just about everyone better brace for the impact. The contact center and other operations touching the customer are emerging as the sweet spots for AI in the enterprise. In a Forrester survey, 57 percent of AI adopters said improving the customer experience is the biggest benefit.

"I can't wait to push some paper today!" The mind-numbing work to keep the wheels of commerce rolling--filling out invoices, deciphering hand-written memos, processing insurance claims--can be a real grind. It's been that way since the time when Ebenezer Scrooge refused to provide another lump of coal to help warm overworked clerk Bob Cratchit. Lacking frailty of mind and body, artificial intelligence for business process automation appears to be a no-brainer. In fact, a number of companies are employing AI techniques such as machine learning, computer vision and natural language processing to automate business processes.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next two months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. It moves just a little too quickly for my general level of comfort around robots that look like giant bugs. I don't think it's recognized widely enough that SpaceX is building giant rockety robots with a whole bunch of very sophisticated autonomy going on: At some point, someone in a meeting said, "The best way to solve this problem is by putting a flamethrower on a drone."

EUROPE will never create a hub of tech firms and investors to rival Silicon Valley, many experts on entrepreneurship concur. Its markets are still fragmented along national lines, flows of capital into the region are limited and because of lingering, conservative attitudes to risk, few startups grow to rival American champions. "Europe is toxic", argues Oussama Ammar, an outspoken founder of an incubator in Paris. "Life that should happen, does not happen", he says. But some digital life does flourish, spread among cities rather than fixing in one spot.

Should humans avoid space and leave it to our robots? This question depends on what our intentions of space travel are. If we assume that most jobs on earth will become automated in the future & AI reaches a point where it views the human race as a resource drainer, then space travel may become a colonisation activity as opposed to pure exploration. Space will be our way of surviving. So naturally, humans will have to travel space.

After a delayed launch and one aborted delivery attempt, SpaceX's caution paid off Thursday when its Dragon capsule stuffed full of food, equipment, and experiments successfully docked with the International Space Station (ISS). Now on its 10th re-supply mission, the private space company has become an essential part of the supply lines supporting an increasingly intricate space operation. After a GPS error scuttled its first docking attempt Wednesday, the Dragon capsule smoothly slipped close enough to the ISS for the space station's robotic arm to snag the craft early Thursday morning, along with the 5,500 pounds of goodies on board. "Looks like we've got a great capture," radioed space station commander Shane Kimbrough. In addition to a much needed food refresh, the capsule also contains more than 250 science experiments.

For years, the cloud has been considered as the most powerful and disruptive force ever. What is true for IT, however, it is hard to find legit arguments for the entire enterprise stack. The cloud delivers the necessary toolset to support the digital evolution on a very technological level to purchase, build and run an infrastructure, platform and software as service. Thus, the cloud must be considered as the foundation, the non-discussable requirement! However, for IT as well as business decision makers the voluntary exercise now is artificial intelligence (AI).

For many it is no more than the first port of call when a niggling question raises its head. Found on its pages are answers to mysteries from the fate of male anglerfish, the joys of dorodango, and the improbable death of Aeschylus. But beneath the surface of Wikipedia lies a murky world of enduring conflict. A new study from computer scientists has found that the online encyclopedia is a battleground where silent wars have raged for years. Since Wikipedia launched in 2001, its millions of articles have been ranged over by software robots, or simply "bots", that are built to mend errors, add links to other pages, and perform other basic housekeeping tasks.

In a bid to ensure that self-driving cars are safe when they hit the roads, the UK government has put together a new proposal. The proposal states that insurance cover for self-driving cars must offer protection for both times when the driver is in control, and when the car is in autonomous mode. Ministers hope that if the bill is passed, it will put the UK at the forefront of the modern transport revolution. In a bid to ensure that self-driving cars are safe when they hit the road, the UK government has put together a new proposal. The proposal states that insurance cover for self-driving cars must offer protection for both times when the driver is in control, and when the car is in autonomous mode. Insurers could still try to recover the costs from the vehicles' makers.

Artificial intelligence is helping to monitor wind turbines in some of the world's most remote locations. Many of these turbines are going offshore where there's plenty of space and winds blow the strongest. But remote locations also make it harder to fix turbines if something goes wrong. In Denmark'sNorth Sea, service vessels aren't even able to travel to the turbines four to five months of the year because of rough seas. And it often takes a crane to work on the gigantic turbines, each with blades as big as the wingspan of an Airbus A380 airliner. Wind turbines – like a lot of machinery – have been autonomous for decades.