Sanofi, which has moved purposefully into high technologies to get more from its manufacturing, will lean heavily on that strategy to shrink costs and fatten margins. Using robotics, artificial intelligence and new generation manufacturing should save it half a billion euros in annual costs by 2022. So says Sanofi CFO Jean-Baptiste Chasseloup de Chatillon who was filling in some details of new CEO Paul Hudson's €2 billion cost-savings plan laid out Tuesday during Sanofi's investor conference. "It is a leapfrogging of productivity. It reduces cycle time," Chasseloup de Chatillon said on a webcast of the conference.

Future Life Conference is an opportunity to take a step beyond what you already know about the impact emerging technologies have on Australia's health system, education, job market, housing and climate. Imagine your children or grandchildren being born within the next 20 years. What will their life be like? What will their education look like with the support of emerging technologies? How will they find work when a lot of people fear of losing their jobs to artificial intelligence?

In his upcoming book, The Future Is Faster Than You Think, which will hit bookshelves in late January 2020, Diamandis makes the case for why he believes big tech companies are going to be running healthcare by 2030. In December, he came to Fast Company's offices to make the case for why Big Tech is the doctor of the future. "We're going to see Apple and Amazon and Google and all the data-driven companies that are in our homes right now become our healthcare providers," he says, referring to smart speakers such as Google's Assistant, Amazon's Alexa, and Apple's HomePod. While many of these home voice assistants started with simple tasks like restocking home pantries and surfacing cooking tutorials, they're already starting to move into the business of managing family well-being. Amazon has put significant effort into making Alexa a health resource.

A warehouse in an industrial park about an hour's drive north of downtown Beijing offers a paradoxical picture of China's much-hyped, and increasingly controversial, artificial intelligence boom. Inside the building, a handful of squat cylindrical robots scuttle about, following an intricate and invisible pattern. Occasionally, one zips beneath a stack of shelves, raises it gently off the ground, then brings it to a station where a human worker can grab items for packing. A handful of engineers stare intently at code running on a bank of computers. The robots and the AI behind them were developed by Megvii, one of China's vaunted AI unicorns.

Through the years of its troubles, when it hemorrhaged reputation and people, Wells Fargo never backed off from its determination to innovate. The fourth-largest U.S. bank has been a digital banking powerhouse for years on both the retail and business banking sides. It has 30 million digitally active customers -- about 43% of its total customer base. The bank's Innovation Group, a key element of that success, has been led since May 2018 by Lisa Frazier, EVP and Head of Innovation, making her one of the highest-ranking women in financial technology. Frazier, an Australian, has an unusual background for a digital banking leader.

Accel Robotics, one of a growing number of AI startups that's setting out to enable automated cashierless stores, has raised $30 million in a series A round of funding led by SoftBank, with participation from New Ground Ventures, Toyo Kanetsu Corporate Venture Investment Partnership, and RevTech Ventures. Founded out of San Diego in 2015, Accel Robotics is developing the AI and computer vision smarts needed for checkout-free stores, which are designed to make queuing a thing of the past and will generate vast swathes of consumer data. The general idea is that the shopper simply walks into a store, picks items from the shelves, and then walks out again -- with the receipt sent directly to their mobile device. Accel Robotics has largely flown under the radar compared to other companies operating in the burgeoning cashierless store sphere, but it said it is already working on deployments across North America and Japan -- including in restaurants and drugstore chains. Amazon is arguably the highest profile cashier-free store operator, and since the ecommerce giant debuted its concept Amazon Go stores back in 2016, it has expanded the outlets to 18 locations across the U.S. A number of startups have launched to bring automated supermarkets to every city by helping retailers adapt their existing stores.

The global industry potential of artificial intelligence is well-documented, yet the vision of this AI future is uncertain. AI and automation trends are generating significant debate among economists and governments, particularly around employment impact and uncertain social outcomes. The mainstream attention is warranted. According to PwC, AI "could contribute up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy in 2030, more than the current output of China and India combined." AI is at a crossroads, and its long-term outlook is still hotly debated.

The global industry potential of artificial intelligence is well-documented, yet the vision of this AI future is uncertain. AI and automation trends are generating significant debate among economists and governments, particularly around employment impact and uncertain social outcomes. The mainstream attention is warranted. According to PwC, AI "could contribute up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy in 2030, more than the current output of China and India combined." AI is at a crossroads, and its long-term outlook is still hotly debated.

NEW DELHI: There is a need for degree courses and professional training programmes in Artificial Intelligence (AI) with the changing technology landscape, according to industry and academic experts. While the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has already introduced AI as an optional subject in schools, no full fledged degree courses are available in the area in the country besides few short term courses. "In the digital era and rapidly-evolving business landscape, AI is influencing a range of industries and altering the job roles. The world is looking at AI for its widespread applications in almost every industry and is considered to be the next big technological shift in industrial and smartphone revolution. The need of the hour is to make AI education more focused and easily available," said Varun Dhamija, Vice President, Pearson Professional Programs (PPP). "According to our recent survey, 60 pc Indians believe that the world is shifting to a model where people participate in education over a lifetime which makes it age agnostic.

Although corporate adoption of automation technology is becoming more widespread, success remains elusive. Three-quarters of respondents in a 2018 McKinsey global survey say their companies have begun to automate some business processes or plan to do so within the next year. Yet many find total returns have fallen short of their expected target. Our client work indicates there are two main reasons for this. First, too many organizations fail to consider how automating certain steps in a business or customer-facing process will affect upstream or downstream handoffs and connections, which can introduce new inefficiencies, capping the value delivered by automation.