The Managing Partner of Intergroup Partners AG, Montserrat Corominas, has recently been published in Inc Magazine. This is her article "Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality are about to transform business. Here's how to be prepared" KEY OBSERVATIONS Most business leaders are not quite sure yet how AI and VR are relevant to their companies and what is in it for them. To my understanding, these are only contemporary descriptions of state of the art technologies. The most important topic to discuss for boards, founders and management teams in regards to AI/VR is the inherent new way of communication through digitization.

In recent years, Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers have finally cracked problems that they've worked on for decades, from Go to human-level speech recognition. A key piece was the ability to gather and learn on mountains of data, which pulled error rates past the success line. In short, big data has transformed AI, to an almost unreasonable level. Blockchain technology could transform AI too, in its own particular ways. Some applications of blockchains to AI are mundane, like audit trails on AI models. Some appear almost unreasonable, like AI that can own itself -- AI DAOs. All of them are opportunities. This article will explore these applications. Before we discuss applications, let's first review what's different about blockchains compared to traditional big-data distributed databases like MongoDB. We can think of blockchains as "blue ocean" databases: they escape the "bloody red ocean" of sharks competing in an existing market, opting instead to be in a blue ocean of uncontested market space. Famous blue ocean examples are Wii for video game consoles (compromise raw performance, but have new mode of interaction), or Yellow Tail for wines (ignore the pretentious specs for wine lovers; make wine more accessible to beer lovers). By traditional database standards, traditional blockchains like Bitcoin are terrible: low throughput, low capacity, high latency, poor query support, and so on.

A scarf designed to filter out harmful elements in city air. A breast pump that fits into a bra and keeps track of pumping volume. A drone that can dive into water and help anglers catch a big one. CES 2017, the consumer tech event held in Las Vegas this week, featured vendors with automated baubles, humanoid robots and "smart" everything -- a dishwasher, hairbrush and lawnmower, to name a few. But it's not so much the gadgets as their underlying technology that will make CIOs -- who seek out new tools for business, not the home or yard -- stop, look and listen.

Nick Bostrom, University of Oxford and director of both the Future of Humanity Institute and the Strategic Artificial Intelligence Research Centre "We are only 20 to 50 years away from Machine AI achieving human-level intelligence... and from reaching a human equivalent level of capability, AI is forecast to then see its progress take a rapid upward curve to super- intelligence.

Digitization and automation are ever-growing topics in relation to the workplace. A famous Oxford study on the future of employment from 2013 estimated that up to 47% of American jobs may be automated by 2035; a brand new McKinsey study shows that current technologies could automate 45 percent of job activities; and the business mantra goes that if you can digitize, you should digitize to gain a competitive advantage. But how do we, as human beings, really feel about potentially working with or even for AIs, and what impact do we think they will have on our workplace? A recent study conducted in the US, UK and Denmark explores people's openness towards working with and for "unbiased computer programs"--defined as "a software robot that makes decisions or proposals for decisions based on data from HR, financial or market information. The software robot is unbiased, i.e. it is not affected by the personal, social and cultural bias that influence human decision making, but balances all input only based on the data."

According to Gartner's latest report, Worldwide IT spending is forecast to reach $3.5 trillion in 2017, up 2.9 percent from 2016's estimated spending of $3.4 trillion. Additionally, IT services spending is also set to rise 4.8 percent in 2017 to reach $943 billion. All of these figures tell us that many organizations have already allocated billions of dollars to keep up with the emerging trends in enterprise technology. One of our CMS-Connected contributors and a founding partner of Digital Clarity Group, Cathy McKnight, wrote a splendid article about the relationship between artificial intelligence and marketers. She also pointed out that more and more of the technology titans have adopted and leveraged the power of AI to enable their platforms to generate natural language, content optimization, analyze consumer behavior, and ultimately, be ahead of the game by knowing more about their customers' needs than even the customers know themselves.

Previous studies have shown that it is possible to detect macroscopic patterns of cultural change over periods of centuries by analyzing large textual time series, specifically digitized books. This method promises to empower scholars with a quantitative and data-driven tool to study culture and society, but its power has been limited by the use of data from books and simple analytics based essentially on word counts. This study addresses these problems by assembling a vast corpus of regional newspapers from the United Kingdom, incorporating very fine-grained geographical and temporal information that is not available for books. The corpus spans 150 years and is formed by millions of articles, representing 14% of all British regional outlets of the period. Simple content analysis of this corpus allowed us to detect specific events, like wars, epidemics, coronations, or conclaves, with high accuracy, whereas the use of more refined techniques from artificial intelligence enabled us to move beyond counting words by detecting references to named entities.

Betty, a resplendent royal blue 1999 Paul Smith Mini Cooper, has just arrived downstairs. Handing over the keys is a tweed-wearing, bearded Tony Grant, who owns 10 such Minis with names like Poppy, Mildred and Lulu. Self-styled "Head Gasket" at Small Car Big City, he is adding a new twist to the car hire and car-sharing business. As part of the fun, there are fancy dress outfits in the boot to match The Italian Job film theme, along with a crowbar and a bar of (imitation) gold. I booked Betty through recently launched car sharing app Turo, which is aiming to bring an Airbnb vibe to the world of wheels.

The Government passed an "assault on freedom" while people were afraid and distracted, according to campaigners. Campaign group Liberty is requesting a High Court judicial review of the wide-ranging new spying tactics in the Investigatory Powers Act. That law was passed at the end of last year and gives spies – and a range of other organisations including the Food Standards Agency – the power to see anyone's entire internet history, alongside other unprecedented rules. The Liberty challenge will focus on bulk powers, which let intelligence agencies collect up huge amount of data in case it needs to be used in future, meaning that people not under investigation have their information watched. 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.

SANTA CLARA, Calif., and Eindhoven, Netherlands, Jan. 3, 2017 – Intel has agreed to purchase a 15 percent ownership stake in HERE, a global provider of digital maps and location-based services, from HERE's current indirect shareholders: AUDI AG, BMW AG and Daimler AG. In conjunction with Intel's acquisition of a stake in HERE, the two companies also signed an agreement to collaborate on the research and development of a highly scalable proof-of-concept architecture that supports real-time updates of high definition (HD) maps for highly and fully automated driving. Additionally, the two companies plan to jointly explore strategic opportunities that result from enriching edge-computing devices with location data. "Cars are rapidly becoming some of the world's most intelligent, connected devices," said Brian Krzanich, Intel CEO. "We look forward to working with HERE and its automotive partners to deliver an important technology foundation for smart and connected cars of the future."