Everybody speaks about the digital economy and the transformation effect it produces in business as well as in our daily lives. By now, most of us understand what digital transformation entails and why it is important for businesses to embrace it in full scale. However, the road to transformation becomes more challenging when we try to navigate how to get from where we are today to realizing digitization at its maximum expression. It is easy to get lost amid new technologies and fashionable terms. You can quickly get confused with the role that new artificial intelligence and machine learning tools play in this new world, the significance of the Internet of Things at the point of data capture, the potential of analytics and finally, the ubiquitous role of the cloud.

In late February, the UN-Secretary General held a press conference, highlighting the risk of starvation in East Africa and the necessity to raise funds to address the emergency situations in Somalia and South Sudan. Drought has been back in these countries and their neighbours since 2016, leading to a huge current food crisis. While governments are trying to handle the situation, how could technology innovations help prevent starvation and improve agriculture management in the future? We met with Laurent Rivière, a French 30 years-old entrepreneur, who shared with us his view on the subject with a combination of engineer pragmatism and changemaker idealism . Founder and CEO at Sunbirds for two years, he explained to us how his "bird of the sun," his solar drone, is addressing the agriculture challenges of the 21st century.

Listen up, payment provider community. Increased digitalization, continued pursuit of integration across channels, ever-increasing complexity, more partnerships and the integration of technologies like the Internet of Things, machine learning and artificial intelligence may be what's needed to propel the payment provider industry forward, at least according to Creditcall's CEO Lars Pedersen. "We must embrace these new technologies and the resulting complexity so we can provide solutions that merchants can readily deploy to increase revenues, reduce costs, and gain greater insight into customer preferences and business logistics," Pedersen said. As a company that was just named to the London Stock Exchange Group's 1,000 Companies to Inspire Britain, all while being 100 percent self-funded, payments provider Creditcall may just have that certain je ne sais quoi. "The main reason we have been able to grow in a self-funded way is that we have a rigorous process for deciding what activity to take on," Pedersen said.

The face of a 10,000 year old African caveman has been revealed for the first time, reigniting the debate over whether the first ancient people to set foot on American soil were African or Asian. Digital imaging by Brazilian graphic designer, Cicero Moraes - who is not of African decent himself - shows the features of a 40 to 50-year-old prehistoric African man whose face resembles Australian Aborigines. The reconstruction, nicknamed Apiuna, was based on a skull discovered deep inside a cave during an archaeological dig in Lagoa Santa, south east Brazil, some 50 years ago. The discovery of the African's face controversially challenges the belief that the American continents' first pioneers were Asian. Instead, it suggests that Apiuna was part of the first wave of people in America who were Africans with Austro-Melanesian characteristics.

To meet the growing demand for AI expertise, companies are offering online education courses to prepare the workforce for the future. Increasingly, computers and devices learn and act on their own using software algorithms, the building blocks for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Getting smartphones to understand voice commands, smart home sprinkler systems to change with the weather and online services to predict what people want requires programmers skilled in AI and ML. Demand for these coding skills is skyrocketing. Making devices smart and proactive remains controversial to anyone who fears that automation will lead to human job loss.

The deeper danger is that, if AI takes control over more and more of the decisions in our lives, will we become less free? Already, Google's search engine decides for me which search results it thinks I, Chris Kutarna, will want to see, and shows me those. How can I disagree with a decision that gets made without my knowledge? Now, fast forward to the future and imagine a sales AI that knows my personality and can perfectly manipulate me to buy a vacation to, say, Brazil. And I go to Brazil and I do have a great time.

This piece was originally published at Scout.ai. "This is a propaganda machine. It's targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. It's a level of social engineering that I've never seen before. They're capturing people and then keeping them on an emotional leash and never letting them go," said professor Jonathan Albright. Albright, an assistant professor and data scientist at Elon University, started digging into fake news sites after Donald Trump was elected president. Through extensive research and interviews with Albright and other key experts in the field, including Samuel Woolley, Head of Research at Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project, and Martin Moore, Director of the Centre for the Study of Media, Communication and Power at Kings College, it became clear to Scout that this phenomenon was about much more than just a few fake news stories. It was a piece of a much bigger and darker puzzle -- a Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine being used to manipulate our opinions and behavior to advance specific political agendas. By leveraging automated emotional manipulation alongside swarms of bots, Facebook dark posts, A/B testing, and fake news networks, a company called Cambridge Analytica has activated an invisible machine that preys on the personalities of individual voters to create large shifts in public opinion.

The global text analytics market size is estimated to grow from $3.97 billion in 2017 to $8.79 billion by 2022, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 17.2%. The customer experience management (CEM) is expected to hold the largest market share during the forecast period. Among the various applications in the text analytics market, the CEM application is expected to hold the largest market share during the forecast period. Text mining is the most traditional application in customer service and is frequently utilized to improve customer experience through various information sources. Today, text analytics is implemented to offer quick, computerized feedback to the clients, which significantly reduces dependency on executives for resolving issues.

Together, the last two responses add up to 71 percent of respondents, and Accenture reports that insurers are investing in AI in several areas of the business, including distribution, claims and underwriting. They are looking to empower agents, brokers and employees to enhance the customer experience with automated personalized services, faster claims handling and individual risk-based underwriting processes, Accenture said in a statement. Separately, Carrier Management interviewed representatives of four global insurance groups--XL Catlin, Allianz, QBE and Zurich--who described some of the AI initiatives already underway at their firms. They range from condensing lengthy engineering reports for swifter underwriting, reassigning some of the claims administrative services handled by offshore humans to robots, interpreting crop risk information delivered by drones, and deciphering communications from customers with heavy accents using natural language processing. Also detailed is Zurich's use of a multilingual natural language processing product called Cogito from Expert Systems that mines complicated, voluminous claims data to rapidly provide more refined information to claims adjusters for faster decision-making.

The rightful owner of the title Conor McGregor never defended will finally be determined Saturday night. The UFC featherweight championship fight between Jose Aldo and Max Holloway highlights UFC 212 from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The main event is the only championship fight on the card, and the latest UFC 212 betting odds indicate that the current champion will hold onto his belt. The event costs $69.99 to order in HD on pay-per-view, and it's scheduled to start at 9 p.m. EDT. Fans can watch the fights with a live stream online by ordering UFC 212 at ufc.tv for $59.99.