AI is adding power to these chatbots and helping bridge the gap between humans and machines by employing natural language capabilities. These more intelligent chatbots are more capable and are being used in a variety of different contexts such as online customer support, phone interactions, information retrieval, assisting with online commerce or tech support, and the increasing popularity of voice assistants. Because chatbots are easy to deploy, companies find them a great first use case for AI within their organization. Because bots can provide consistent results without the need to sleep or take breaks, companies are able to keep them deployed to engage and interact with customers. Organizations including banking, finance, retail, and others have AI-enabled chatbots to help enhance customer engagement, collect basic customer information and answer general company questions.

The latest advancements in Artificial Intelligence have been much tremendous and inspiring. It has become a part of everyday life for almost all consumers. In a large range of domains, the technology has transformed the way humans work and live. From smart home devices like Alexa, Siri, among others to large scale data security and fraud detection, all are inspired by and relied on AI. Despite this, there is still a large gap between current AI systems and human-like intelligence. Over time, the human brain has developed and advanced in order to respond to survival instincts, harness intellectual curiosity, and achieve demands of nature.

Executives from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Facebook met officials at Downing Street on Wednesday to discuss their role in the coronavirus crisis. One of the things discussed was their role in "modelling and tracking data". In similar meetings at the White House, meanwhile, companies were asked how they could use artificial intelligence. A World Health Organization report last month said AI and big data were a key part of China's response to the virus. Facebook is already working with researchers at Harvard University's School of Public Health and the National Tsing Hua University, in Taiwan, sharing anonymised data about people's movements and high-resolution population density maps, which help them forecast the spread of the virus.

This is a keynote highlight from the O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference in Beijing 2019. You can also see other highlights from the event. Get a free trial today and find answers on the fly, or master something new and useful. Receive weekly insight from industry insiders--plus exclusive content, offers, and more on the topic of AI. Receive weekly insight from industry insiders--plus exclusive content, offers, and more on the topic of AI.

Work and Winnefeld discuss the Pentagon's "Third Offset" Strategy, and delve into the military applications and ethical dimensions of technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum science. They also review the Defense Department's transition from focusing on counterterrorism and counterinsurgency to great power competition. Work, now the Distinguished Senior Fellow for Defense and National Security at the Center for a New American Security, explains how Russia and China are developing a range of technologies in an effort to leapfrog the U.S. in the military realm. Military applications of new technologies: "We don't know how AI and 5G and quantum and synthetic biology, we don't know how they are all going to go to work. But they all have the capabilities to provide a step function in the way we fight wars. And the competitor who gets there first is going to have an enormous advantage. This is a time of enormous foment inside the department. The stakes associated with AI: "[T]he competition in AI is a central one in great power competition between China and Russia. AI will reflect the values of the competitors. Whereas we want to protect human privacy, we want to protect human dignity, we want to make sure that our use of AI is ethical and moral and consistent with our laws, an authoritarian regime might not do it that way." On competition with Russia and China: "This is not a time where we can really afford to waste the time we have. We believe that the Chinese and the Russians are really pressing us in the military sphere. They've had 18 years of kind of coming after us while we've been focused on counterterrorism. And so they've closed the gap to an uncomfortable degree.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will change the way we learn and work in the near future. Nearly 400 million workers globally will change their occupations in the next 10 years, and business schools are uniquely situated to respond to the shifts coming to the future of work. However, a recent study, "Implications of Artificial Intelligence on Business Schools and Lifelong Learning," shows that business schools remain cautious in adapting management education to address the changing needs of students, workers and organizations, writes Anne Trumbore in this opinion piece. Trumbore, one of the study's coauthors, is senior director of Wharton Online, a strategic digital learning initiative at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. In the past few weeks, COVID 19 has moved hundreds of millions of students around the globe from physical to online classes.

ARTIFICIAL intelligence and algorithms could help enhance care in the Wee County while freeing up council staff from administrative burdens. Technology is going to play an increasingly important part in Clackmannanshire Council's organisational redesign, which underpins the budget agreed at the end of last month. The local authority is looking to use digital technologies to improve its efficiency and free up staff to work on more complex areas. Documents tabled at Kilncraigs explained that technology will be used to "improve the accessibility of public services through the use of enhanced online facilities, and to process high volumes of transactional enquiries by automating such systems". During the budget meeting, Councillor Helen Lewis explained that "the buzzword is algorithms" and that technology can allow the council to use data to keep people safer or to enable earlier and more effective interventions.

Working hand in hand with experts from Fujitsu's AI Center of Excellence, French IT services company D.FI has co-created an AI-powered IT service desk capability that has enhanced productivity by a third. Headlines abound about exotic applications of AI technology, from piloting supertankers to composing symphonies. But there are plenty of deployments of AI in much more practical and -- for IT executives -- familiar settings. Groupe D.FI is a French IT services company that provides hosting, cloud and managed services, with revenues of around €80 million ($88.7m) and a workforce of around 250. But in recent years it has seen its ability to combine sales growth and higher productivity thwarted by a resource-hungry activity: the efficiency with which its teams can process and resolve customers' technology service requests. Thomas Meunier, COO at D.FI, explains the scope of the challenge.

Artificial intelligence researchers at IBM have introduced a major upgrade to the famed Watson computer, allowing it to understand idioms and colloquialisms for the first time. IBM says the update makes it the first commercial AI system capable of identifying, understanding and analysing some of the most challenging aspects of the English language. Phrases like "hardly helpful" and "hot under the collar" are tricky for algorithms to spot, meaning AI is unable to debate complex topics or have nuanced conversations with humans. "Language is a tool for expressing thought and opinion, as much as it is a tool for information," said Rob Thomas, a general manager at IBM Data and AI. "This is why we believe that advancing our ability to capture, analyse, and understand more from language with NLP will help transform how businesses utilise their intellectual capital that is codified in data." Russia has launched a humanoid robot into space on a rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS).

Social media may offer a wealth of intelligence to journalists as they scout for stories, but harnessing its true potential becomes a challenge given how easy it is to misrepresent information online. With false facts and narratives intertwining these platforms, it becomes an arduous task for them to filter accurate information. And it is not just with texts. Fuelled by the meme culture, images that we find in our newsfeeds may often be fake. With the second-highest number of internet users after China, these issues are magnified in India.