Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Accenture's Second Quarter Fiscal 2017 Earnings Conference Call. During today's conference all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Instructions will be given at that time. I would now like to turn the conference over to Managing Director, Head of Investor Relations, Angie Park. Thank you, Shannon and thanks everyone for joining us today on our second quarter fiscal 2017 earnings announcement. As Shannon just mentioned, I'm Angie Park, Managing Director, Head of Investor Relations. With me today are Pierre Nanterme, our Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; and David Rowland, our Chief Financial Officer. We hope you've had an opportunity to review the News Release we issued a short time ago. Let me quickly outline the agenda for today's call. Pierre will begin with an overview of our results. David will take you through the financial details, including the income statement and balance sheet for the second quarter. Pierre will then provide a brief update on our market positioning before David provides our business outlook for the third quarter and full fiscal year 2017. We will then take your questions before Pierre provides a wrap up at the end of the call. As a reminder, when we discuss revenues during today's call, we're talking about revenues before reimbursements or net revenues. Some of the matters we'll discuss on the call, including our business outlook are forward-looking and as such, are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to those factors set forth in today's News Release and discussed in our Annual Report on Form 10-K and Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and other SEC filings. These risks and uncertainties could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed on this call.

DataRobot, a machine learning platform that helps enterprises build predictive models at speed, has raised $54 million in a Series C funding round led by existing investor New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Founded out of Boston in 2012, the DataRobot platform features hundreds of open-source machine learning algorithms and harnesses best practices and knowledge from "the world's leading scientists," enabling users of all skill levels to build predictive models for their companies. Users upload their data, select their target variables, and DataRobot "automates, trains, and evaluates" multiple predictive models. Though it can be used to help data scientists work more quickly and at scale, DataRobot is targeted at anyone within the enterprise who's looking to tinker with artificial intelligence to see whether it can improve their decision making. The company had raised around $ 57 million before now, including a $33 million round last February, and its latest cash injection will be used to "fuel the company's mission to bring automated machine learning to mainstream business users," according to a company statement.

Legal research company Casetext has raised $12 million in a new round of funding. The money will be used to expand its software platform that offers insights into cases cited in legal documents and further develop CARA (Case Analysis Research Assistant), an AI-powered assistant for lawyers. Using natural language understanding, Casetext scans the text of legal briefs to locate and analyze case citations. The company also offers access to 10 million court cases and statutes annotated by a community of litigators. The $12 million funding round was led by Canvas Ventures, with participation from Union Square Ventures, 8VC, and Red Sea Ventures.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has occasionally gotten a bad rap in recent years. Futurologists like Elon Musk foresee a future where humans, due to becoming obsolete, will need to merge with machines in order to survive, while stories such as a Japanese company laying off over 30 employees to be replaced by robots have led to much hand-wringing about future job losses. Undoubtedly, the rise of the robots will deeply affect a wide variety of industries. However, in my opinion, AI will have huge benefits for the majority of sectors, especially for my own profession, digital advertising. While previous research from Oxford University has predicted that 33% of marketing associate professionals are at risk of being replaced, these are the lower-level jobs of the profession, and the scope of these jobs will definitely evolve as AI takes over some of these roles' responsibilities.

Mythic is one of them, and it claims to be taking a different approach than the others. The Austin, Texas-based startup wants to move away from the cloud and a dependence on network connections by putting AI-on-a-chip inside smart devices like security cameras and health wearables. DFJ believes in the potential of this approach to AI and led an $8.8 million round that was announced today. The startup has developed both software and microchips to make its AI smarter and faster. Today, artificial neural networks need big server racks powered by graphics processing units (GPUs) to handle complex algorithms.

Just days later, we got our first hint Buffett himself was buying Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL)! Followed shortly after by that bombshell CNBC interview (here's the transcript), where he revealed an $18 billion plus Apple investment*, the vast majority bought by him in January and recent months (and the rest by Todd and Ted in early-2016). What better confirmation of my assertion that value investors - even the greatest of them all, at 86 years of age - would be wise to pose such a question to themselves? In fact, I wonder if it's the largest stock investment ever made by a single investor (again, in terms of cost)? Sure, Todd, Ted, and Charlie did provide some inspiration and feedback here, but we can be sure Buffett never buys anything until he makes his own mind up! Thoughts?] Was I confident I'd see Buffett talking up an Apple position just weeks later? And maybe I chose it specifically as the largest, most obvious and controversial value stock out there. Not to mention, the head fake I pulled: While I did summarize its attractive fundamentals and valuation, my post clearly wasn't intended to be a detailed thesis. But hey, it was still the right question at the right time, so I'll take the kudos!

Humans and Artificial Intelligence (AI) will merge in an event known as'the singularity' by 2045, a Google executive has predicted. Super human cyborgs with nanobot implants in their brains will be funnier, sexier and smarter than humans today, according to futurist Ray Kurzweil, Futurism reports. The computer scientist believes we will see an AI pass what he calls a'valid' Turing test within the next 12 years. "By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence," he said in an interview with SXSW. "That leads to computers having human intelligence, our putting them inside our brains, connecting them to the cloud, expanding who we are. It's here, in part, and it's going to accelerate."

Amongst all the activity in autonomously driven vehicle joint ventures, new R&D facilities, strategic acquisitions (such as Mobileye being acquired by Intel) and booming startup fundings, two big players in the industry, NVIDIA and Bosch, are partnering to develop an AI self-driving car supercomputer. Bosch CEO Dr Volkmar Denner announced the partnership during his keynote address at Bosch Connected World, in Berlin. "Automated driving makes roads safer, and artificial intelligence is the key to making that happen," said Denner. "We are making the car smart. We are teaching the car how to maneuver through road traffic by itself."

Nvidia has announced a new partnership with Bosch to sell its Drive PX 2 driver-assist platform to automakers. In effect, the deal gives Nvidia a go-to-market strategy for its self-driving hardware and software platform. Bosch joins ZF as the two so-called tier-one suppliers that will sell Nvidia's technology to automakers. Nvidia's technology uses "deep learning" artificial intelligence, which is a fancy way of saying its computer brain learns like a human does: instead of needing to be programmed for every possible driving scenario, it learns what the appropriate behavior is, even for unexpected situations. Theoretically, a car company looking to make its car capable of autonomous driving will also be able to go to Bosch or ZF and buy that technology to integrate into their cars, and sell those to consumers.

In the consumer report, we are number one once again and just like the Q7, in the consumer report it also occupies the first position as the best luxury SUV. And I think this power of the brand makes it possible for us to grow significantly. There are couple of models which have not even be launched yet in this market, models which we already know here, for instance the S4, the A5, and the entirely new A5 Sportback. They are now being launched in the United States. All new models for this market, and I assume that this year once again we are going to experience very solid growth in the United States. And the question so whether we spend more money for this? I can tell you we even spend less money in form of sales discounts because of the powerful brand and the relatively young product portfolio. So you would take the second part?