In 2017 Gartner predicted that artificial intelligence (AI) would benefit procurement and sourcing technology. That moment has arrived, according to Mike Quindazzi, managing director at PriceWaterhouseCoopers and top financial-tech influencer. "We're now in the golden age of AI, where advancements come from voluminous sets of data, new algorithms being created, computing power and the ability to do this in the cloud at scale," said Quindazzi. Procurement data has exploded because procurement has evolved into something called "intelligent spend management," which oversees all corporate purchasing processes including direct and indirect purchases, travel and external labor. Quindazzi cautions that while AI has many use cases in procurement, such as rating vendors, "there will always be a human at the end of AI processes, so there needs to be a sense of accountability."

In a wide-ranging discussion today at VentureBeat's AI Transform 2019 conference in San Francisco, AWS AI VP Swami Sivasubramanian declared "Every innovation in technology is going to be driven by developers." Sivasubramanian made the statement while talking about growing demand for machine learning engineers and internal efforts at Amazon to train more employees to use machine learning. Facebook VP Jérôme Pesenti also stressed plans to make machine learning part of each employee's job at the company. And earlier today, Amazon committed $700 million to upskilling its U.S. workers. "Amazon developed what we call Machine Learning University. This is what we use to train our own engineers on machine learning even if they didn't take it as part of their own university [course work]," Sivasubramanian said.

The introduction of AI is helping the textile manufacturers to improve efficiency and enhance capabilities of employees extracting huge business insights from historical and real-time data. FREMONT, CA: Though artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming several industries, its contribution to the field of the textile industry is relatively new. Conventionally, the textile industry has been associated with low-fixed capital investment, variable production volumes, high competitiveness, high demand on product quality, and a wide range of designs. The introduction of AI is helping the textile manufacturers to improve efficiency and enhance the capabilities of employees extracting tremendous business insights from historical and real-time data. The value of textile products is dramatically affected in case of defects.

"If we properly incorporate artificial intelligence, we can achieve a revolution with regard to sustainability. AI will be the driving force of the fourth industrial revolution," says Hendrik Fink, head of Sustainability Services at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Germany's largest auditing and consulting company. His comment aptly describes the opportunities opened up by new technical developments. In business, for example, it is now common to use systems that analyze and intelligently interpret meaningful data, with one application being the optimization of work and manufacturing processes. In the future, moreover, it will also be in the interest of small and medium-sized businesses to pay attention to sustainability and environmental issues.

In recent years there have been great strides in artificial intelligence (AI), with games often serving as challenge problems, benchmarks, and milestones for progress. Poker has served for decades as such a challenge problem. Past successes in such benchmarks, including poker, have been limited to two-player games. However, poker in particular is traditionally played with more than two players. Multiplayer games present fundamental additional issues beyond those in two-player games, and multiplayer poker is a recognized AI milestone. In this paper we present Pluribus, an AI that we show is stronger than top human professionals in six-player no-limit Texas hold'em poker, the most popular form of poker played by humans. Poker has served as a challenge problem for the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and game theory for decades (1). In fact, the foundational papers on game theory used poker to illustrate their concepts (2, 3). The reason for this choice is simple: no other popular recreational game captures the challenges of hidden information as effectively and as elegantly as poker. Although poker has been useful as a benchmark for new AI and game-theoretic techniques, the challenge of hidden information in strategic settings is not limited to recreational games.

FRANKFURT - Volkswagen AG and Ford Motor Co. will cooperate on electric and self-driving car technology, sharing costs on a global scale to take a major step forward in the industry's disruptive transformation. VW will invest $2.6 billion in Ford's autonomous-car partner Argo AI in a deal that values the operation at more than $7 billion, the two manufacturers said Friday in a joint statement in New York, confirming a figure first reported by Bloomberg. This includes $1 billion in funding and VW contributing its Audi $1.6 billion Autonomous Intelligent Driving unit. "While Ford and Volkswagen remain independent and fiercely competitive in the marketplace, teaming up and working with Argo AI on this important technology allows us to deliver unmatched capability, scale and geographic reach," Ford Chief Executive Officer Jim Hackett said. Ford shares climbed as much as 2.1 percent as of 9:40 a.m.

A New Mexico man was arrested for allegedly beating his girlfriend after their Amazon device alerted police. Eduardo Barros, 28, was with his girlfriend and her daughter at a residence in Tijeras, outside of Albuquerque, on July 2. The pair got into an argument and the confrontation became physical, according to the Bernalillo County Sheriff Department's spokesperson, Deputy Felicia Romero. Eduardo Barros, 28, (pictured), was arrested for allegedly threatening to kill his girlfriend after he mentioned'calling sheriffs' during a fight, which prompted an Alexa device to call 911 It is understood Barros allegedly became angered because of a text message that the woman received and he accused her of cheating on him. He was allegedly in possession of a firearm and threatened to kill his unidentified girlfriend, saying to her, 'Did you call the sheriffs?' A smart speaker, which was connected to a surround sound system inside the house, recognized the comment as a voice command and called 911, Romero told the New York Post.

The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure -- or JEDI -- will store and crunch vast amounts of classified data and let the military use artificial intelligence to speed up war planning and enhance fighting capabilities. Think of it as "The Terminator" meets your iCloud. The robots aren't taking over just yet, but the Pentagon could be bringing us one step closer, thanks to a new project dubbed the "War Cloud." The official name is JEDI: Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, a plan by the Pentagon to build a cloud computing system for the military. The so-called "War Cloud" will store and crunch vast amounts of classified data and let the military use artificial intelligence to speed up war planning, and enhance fighting capabilities. It can also be used for strategic war games, playing out potential conflilcts in a virtual world to give us an early look at what the outcome could be.

Deepfakes are video manipulations that can make people say seemingly strange things. Barack Obama and Nicolas Cage have been featured in these videos. "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" has long been a staple on nursery room shelves for a reason: It teaches kids that joking too much about a possible threat may turn people ignorant when the threat becomes an actual danger. President Donald Trump has been warning about "fake news" throughout his entire political career. And now the real wolf might be just around the corner.

These great deals are the perfect way to jumpstart your weekend. If you make a purchase by clicking one of our links, we may earn a small share of the revenue. However, our picks and opinions are independent from USA Today's newsroom and any business incentives. There are so many reasons to get pumped that the weekend has finally arrived. All the great deals you can grab on everything from the latest fashion and beauty products to meat thermometers and more.