No one wants to miss out on the A.I. revolution. Leery to their lose edge or fall behind competitors, companies big and small are scrambling to deploy artificial intelligence. That was the consensus of a room of top executives gathered at Fortune's CEO Initiative in New York City on Monday afternoon. Though many noted their companies are working to enhance business processes or consumer experience with A.I., the business leaders identified a variety of challenges to those efforts. "The biggest hurdle is talent and the skill of the leadership team," said Daniel Pacthod, a senior partner at consulting giant McKinsey & Co. "It has to be a top-three CEO topic. The CEO then has to say, 'I have to retrain my leadership team, not only at the analytics level but from top to bottom.'"

Robots must be smarter if they're going to pack boxes in warehouses, scan inventory in stores, and even care for the elderly. The rise of machine learning in recent years is making that possible. Steady innovation has led to robots that can independently "learn" to navigate tight corridors and grasp delicate objects without crushing them. Some of the leading American and Japanese robotics companies and investors recently gathered in Menlo Park, Calif. to discuss artificial intelligence in robotics and its impact on business. But it may require some cooperation between the U.S. and an important overseas ally.

Just because we can use it, should we? That's the question more and more people are asking about face recognition technology, software that's already in our phones and our social media feeds and many security systems. San Francisco leaders have voted to ban the police from using it, and even some in the tech industry say there should be limits. BRAD SMITH: It's the kind of technology that can do a lot of good for a lot of people, but it can be misused. It can be used in ways that lead to discrimination and bias.

Much as robots have transformed entire swaths of the manufacturing economy, artificial intelligence and automation are now changing information work, letting humans offload cognitive labor to computers. In journalism, for instance, data mining systems alert reporters to potential news stories, while newsbots offer new ways for audiences to explore information. Automated writing systems generate financial, sports and elections coverage. A common question as these intelligent technologies infiltrate various industries is how work and labor will be affected. In this case, who – or what – will do journalism in this AI-enhanced and automated world, and how will they do it?

Sumitomo Riko Co., a Nagoya-based auto parts maker, has developed a system that can determine whether a driver is holding the steering wheel, a piece of technology that could prove to be indispensable for semi-automated cars. The firm aims to start commercial production of the system -- designed to enable drivers to switch from autonomous driving to manual control safely in case of emergencies -- in the 2020 business year. The so-called Smart Rubber sensor, made of anti-vibration electrically conductive rubber material, can determine which part of the steering wheel a driver is holding by detecting a change of pressure. The auto industry is currently engaged in fierce competition to develop technology to achieve conditional automation -- Level 3 on the Society of Automotive Engineers International's scale to 5. In Level 3, cars are self-driving but a human driver must take over the wheel in emergency situations or if the system requests that the driver intervene. But self-driving mode will not be turned off unless the system determines that the driver is ready to take the wheel to avoid an accident.

FightCamp offers an interactive library of workouts available via subscription. And the Bowflex Max Trainer cardio machine incorporates artificial intelligence to help you step your home workout game up - literally. With summer on the horizon (and Instagram stories calling), I begrudgingly pulled myself out of bed early one morning in May to get some exercise before work. I stood before a stark white, freestanding boxing bag weighed down by hundreds of pounds of sand as Andre Huseman, a high-spirited personal trainer, greeted me. "Welcome back to FightCamp," the jacked fitness professional said, and within seconds he was counting down, "3…2…1."

Contrary to popular belief, videogames aren't dominated by 12-year-old boys. In fact, according to the Entertainment Software Association and its just-released report, 2019 Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry, the median age of a U.S. gamer today is 33 years old and almost evenly split between male and female players (54% compared to 46%, respectively). Conducted by Ipsos for the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), and with additional data provided by the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) and the NPD Group, this annual study is billed as the most in-depth and targeted look at the evolving interactive entertainment space. The PDF report is free to download at theesa.com. "Today, there are 164 million adults who play video games in the United States, and three-quarters of all American households have at least one gamer in them," states Stan Pierre-Louis, Chief Executive Officer of the ESA, which serves as the voice and advocate for the dollar video game industry.

Crafting conversational UI for your chatbot is an important step. Having understood the basics about Conversational UI in our previous post, let us now move on to understanding the steps to be considered while crafting Conversational UIs. With the speed at which our current technology is developing, it won't be long before we start conversing with our computers to get things done. In developed nations, this technology might be already existing today. The kind of technology they have access to and because they are at the forefront of the development of any related technology, they have gained an upper-hand.

Amazon Personalize, first announced during AWS re:Invent last November, is now available to all Amazon Web Services customers. The API enables developers to add custom machine learning models to their apps, including ones for personalized product recommendations, search results and direct marketing, even if they don't have machine learning experience. The API processes data using algorithms originally created for Amazon's own retail business, but the company says all data will be "kept completely private, owned entirely by the customer." The service is now available to AWS users in three U.S. regions, East (Ohio), East (North Virginia) and West (Oregon), two Asia Pacific regions (Tokyo and Singapore) and Ireland in the European Union, with more regions to launch soon. AWS customers who have already added Amazon Personalize to their apps include Yamaha Corporation of America, Subway, Zola and Segment.

The news that the Home Office is sorting applications for visas with secret algorithms applied to online applications is a reminder of one of Theresa May's more toxic and long-lasting legacies: her immigration policies as home secretary. Yet even if the government's aims in immigration policy were fair and balanced, there would still be serious issues of principle involved in digitising the process. Handing over life-changing decisions to machine-learning algorithms is always risky. Small biases in the data become large biases in the outcome, but these are difficult to challenge because the use of software shrouds them in clouds of obfuscation and supposed objectivity, especially when its workings are described as "artificial intelligence". This is not to say they are always harmful, or never any use: with careful training and well-understood, clearly defined problems, and when they are operating on good data, software systems can perform much better than humans ever could.