When Bob Lord announced he was leaving AOL in November last year, most people knew he was going to end up landing a big new role -- not least because he told The Wall Street Journal he wanted to run a public company or a company about to IPO. Lord spent more than a decade at ad agencies, ending up as global CEO at Publicis Groupe's digital technology division, presiding over almost 8,000 employees and 1.8 billion in revenue. In 2013, he left agency land to join AOL as its president, helping to grow revenue from 1.5 billion to more than 3 billion. Verizon, one of AOL's large clients, became so impressed with its programmatic advertising offering that it ended up acquiring the company for 4.4 billion in June last year. Lord is now at IBM, in the newly-created chief digital officer role. Lord hasn't quite replaced Ginni Rometty to run the company, but he has been charged with transforming "Big Blue" into a much slicker operation that he hopes will appeal as much to Silicon Valley techies as its traditional enterprise customers.

As the global population ages, the number of cancer cases is going up. New cancer diagnoses are expected to rise by 70% in the next 2 decades, from 14 million to around 22 million, according to an estimate by the World Health Organization. Corporate giants like Google and IBM are already focusing on making breakthroughs in oncology, using advanced AI algorithms for early detection and personalized treatment of cancer. We used the CB Insights database to find equity-funded startups that are using artificial intelligence to fight cancer. California-based CureMetrix has developed an algorithm for image analysis, which is currently being tested to identify lung cancer in x-rays and for breast cancer detection in mammograms.

AI-powered drones soon will be everywhere, monitoring crowds at major events, checking out traffic patterns on busy roads, surveying disaster sites, and inspecting airplanes. IBM is edging into this airborne safety and maintenance market early, with a deal to bring its Watson internet of things technology to unmanned aircraft systems built by Netherlands-based Aerialtronics. Data captured by high-resolution drone camera lenses will be fed into IBM's visual recognition application programming interfaces (APIs) and services on its Watson cognitive computing and Bluemix cloud-based analytics platforms. The first market for the Aerialtronics drones is expected to be for cell tower maintenance. Instead of sending humans to laboriously climb towers and report back, inspection teams can deploy drones, which quickly gain a 360-degree overview, according to IBM. The visual recognition APIs can then analyze the images captured by the drone to detect problems like damaged cabling or equipment defects.

Trading algorithms continue to dominate financial markets with both good and bad affects. In predictable steady markets they take the emotion out and adhere to a machines rhythm. The bad is when it breaks from left field as we saw in the past week with increased volatility and panic. We are effectively getting repetitive fractals of varying degree, but how do we predict fractals on new unseen fractals? Algorithms are only as good as the data provided and the ability of the algorithms to consume it.

Most small businesses are focused on the nuts and bolts of the IT needed to run their companies, including networks, cloud services and PCs. However, there are many emerging technologies that will likely have large impacts on how businesses are run in the years ahead. The consultancy PwC recently released a report highlighting what it calls eight tech "megatrends" that it thinks will have a large impact on businesses in the next three to seven years. The trends include artificial intelligence, augmented reality, blockchain technology, drones, Internet of Things, robotics, virtual reality and 3D printing. Some of them, like IoT, have been around for years and are already widely used, while others, like virtual reality or the use of blockchain for ledgers and transactions, are rapidly maturing.

What's all the fuss about the voice-activated home speaker that Amazon is due to release in the UK and Germany in late September? This gadget has been available in the US for over a year and has proven a minor hit, with sales estimates between 1.6m and 3m. But these figures belie the potential impact this kind of artificial intelligence device could have on our lives in the near future. Echo doesn't just let you switch on your music by voice command. It's the first of what will be several types of smart home appliances that work beyond simple tasks like playing music or turning on a light.

During the British summer, conversations about sport become almost ubiquitous. This year, however, one participant in those conversations was very different: IBM Watson, IBM's cognitive intelligence. The All England Lawn Tennis Club knew that 2016 would feature unusually fierce competition for attention, with the Tour de France and Euro 2016 taking place alongside Wimbledon. More than ever before, social media was going to be a vital tool in directing that conversation, and directing attention to SW19. Wimbledon's "Cognitive Command Centre" – powered by Watson's intelligence running on a hybrid, IBM-managed cloud - scanned social media for emerging news and trends.

It is getting more and more difficult to avoid being touched by machine learning (ML). If you buy products from Amazon, make bids on eBay, or stream the latest episodes of Narco on Netflix, chances are, your experience has been shaped by an ML algorithm that makes informed assumptions on what your preferences are, or predicts what they will be. If you allow Facebook to tag friends in your photographs, you are taking advantage of deep-learning algorithms trained for recognizing human faces, and if you take a series of photographs on your Android device, Google will piece together a storyboard of the highlights of your weekend. It's the same for businesses, even if they don't necessarily realize it. There was a study recently published by natural language analytics provider Narrative Sciences that revealed an interesting dichotomy: only 38 percent of respondents reported using ML, yet 88 percent stated that they used analytic tools that incorporate many of the fruits of ML such as automated predictive analytics, automated written reporting and communications, and voice recognition and response.

Thinking machines are still decades away from stealing our jobs, but in the meantime they could drastically improve our quality of life and even earn us some extra cash, according to a leading artificial intelligence expert. Toby Simpson, chief technology officer at Cambridge global learning and simulation firm Ososim, will discuss how AI will impact our future at the London Press Club's monthly gathering on Monday. Mr Simpson previously worked at AI company DeepMind, which was acquired by Google in 2014 and is now based in King's Cross. He specialises in biologically inspired artificial intelligence, which helps to make it more human-like and emotional in its interactions with people. At the event for industry professionals in Whitehall -- called Technology: How far can it go?

Could the armies of lawyers needed to close billion-dollar deals soon be a thing of the past? That's what Invoke Capital, the London-based venture firm run by former Autonomy Plc Chief Executive Officer Mike Lynch, is betting with its latest project financing. Invoke said Wednesday that it's making an investment in Luminance, a U.K. startup using artificial intelligence to process legal documents and automate due diligence in mergers and acquisitions. While the amount of the investment was not disclosed, Lynch said in an interview that the figure was "in the low millions." Luminance says its software can read and understand hundreds of pages of legal documents a minute, enabling lawyers to carry out due diligence far faster than previously.