Public Sector Agencies Must Adopt Emerging Technologies Like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to Effectively Compete for Talent, Accenture Report Finds ARLINGTON, Va.; Feb. 2, 2017 – Public sector agencies must adopt emerging technologies – including machine learning, artificial intelligence and biometrics – to attract and retain more technically adept employees. This approach is critical to addressing a widening skills gap and strong competition from a better financed private sector, a new report from Accenture (NYSE: ACN) shows. The report, Emerging Technologies in Public Service, examines the adoption of emerging technologies across agencies with the most direct interaction with citizens or the greatest responsibility for citizen-facing services: health and social services, policing/justice, revenue, border services, administration and pensions / social security. As part of the report, Accenture surveyed nearly 800 public service technology professionals across nine countries to identify emerging technologies being implemented or piloted. These technologies include advanced analytics/ predictive modeling, the Internet of Things, intelligent process automation, video analytics, biometrics/ identity analytics, machine learning, and natural language processing/ generation.

Public sector agencies must adopt emerging technologies – including machine learning, artificial intelligence, and biometrics – to attract and retain more technically adept employees, a new report from Accenture recommends. It said this is critical to addressing a widening skills gap and strong competition from a better financed private sector. According to the report, "Emerging Technologies in Public Service," the need to attract technically proficient employees is becoming even more urgent as the existing workforce continues to age, creating an irrevocable loss of institutional knowledge unless action is taken now. The report emphasized that hiring and developing people with the necessary skills, including the need for emerging technology specialists, is one of the top three challenges across all industries and countries today," the report noted. "The very concept of work is being redefined as different generations enter and exit the workforce in a rapidly changing technological landscape," said Terry Hemken, who leads Accenture's Health & Public Service Analytics Insights for Government business. "Government leaders must make every effort to reskill their people to be relevant in the future and ready to adapt to change." Survey respondents said emerging technologies will augment existing roles rather than replace them. Automating tasks, whether through artificial intelligence, machine learning or other technologies, frees up employees to focus on activities that are more critical and more closely aligned with citizen needs, according to the research. In fact, eight in 10 respondents said that implementing emerging technologies will improve job satisfaction and can aid staff retention, partly by automating certain repetitive tasks and making others more aligned with citizens' direct needs. Nearly 60 percent of respondents also said that being able to implement projects using emerging technologies would require significant investment in reskilling existing staff. "Responsive and responsible leaders must ensure that their people are relevant and adaptable to keep pace with technology," Hemken said. "Creating the future workforce now is the responsibility of the very highest levels of an organization.

We at AIBusiness are officially launching our new series'AI Innovators' this January. This is a series dedicated to featuring interviews with relevant spokespersons across a range of businesses that have entered the world of artificial intelligence. AI Innovators aims to provide our readers with a broad insight into how artificial intelligence is implemented within different industries, anything from finance to medical research. The fourth company to feature in these series is EY, a multinational professional services firm headquartered in London, United Kingdom. EY is one of the largest professional services firm in the world and is one of the "Big Four" accounting firms.

The latest KPMG analysis revealed that China saw Venture Capital (VC) investments reach US$31 billion in 2016, a 19% tear-on-year growth and a new record high, despite a global slowdown. The consultant predicts that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be an additional focus for investors. However, deal volumes declined 42% to 300 from 513 a year earlier, according to Venture Pulse, KPMG's quarterly global report on VC trends. The strong performance is attributed to a number of mega-deals recorded early in the year. The report highlights that artificial intelligence and cognitive learning are poised to transform almost every aspect of people's lives.

Automation replaced 17,000 people's jobs at one of the world's largest professional services and tech firms Accenture over the last 18 months, but no one actually lost their job. Richard Lumb, CEO of financial services at Accenture told Business Insider at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday that while greater automation and the rapid development and implementation of artificial intelligence and robots certainly can eliminate jobs in the workforce, companies can also make sure those employees do not become displaced. "Over the last 18 months, automation replaced 17,000 jobs in back office processing. But actually, we haven't laid those people off. We are fortunate enough to reskill and reposition them. We took that approach when we were going to bring in greater automation at scale. Not [every company] is going to be able to do that and not every company is able to grow and expand like we do," said Lumb to BI. Accenture is one of the largest professional services companies in the world and as of 2016, has 394,000 employees with clients from 200 cities across 120 countries worldwide.

What could your company accomplish if every customer and employee interaction with technology was an intelligent one? The Accenture Technology Vision 2017 delves into a fascinating trend that's at the heart of my daily responsibilities--and I know of substantial interest to our clients. The AI Is the New UI chapter looks at how artificial intelligence (AI) will quickly become more than an underlying technology capability; it will permeate intelligent enterprises and advance to a fundamental tool for daily engagement with people--both customers and employees. We also describe in the Tech Vision how AI will, in time, become the digital spokesperson for leading enterprises. Customers will experience a company's brand through personalized, 100 percent consistent and natural interactions with AI service agents--and even engage with the brand through other companies' AI interfaces. This post highlights how we see this tech trend unfolding.

Computers cannot think, though increasingly, they can do things only humans were able to do. A product of the field of research known as artificial intelligence, cognitive technologies have been evolving over decades. It is now possible to automate tasks that require human perceptual skills, such as recognizing handwriting or identifying faces, and those that require cognitive skills, such as planning, reasoning from partial or uncertain information, and learning. Technologies able to perform tasks such as these, traditionally assumed to require human intelligence, are known as cognitive technologies. Businesses are taking a new look at them because some have improved dramatically in recent years, with impressive gains in computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition, and robotics, among other areas.

Moving beyond a back-end tool for the enterprise, artificial intelligence (AI) is taking on more sophisticated roles within technology interfaces. From autonomous driving vehicles that use computer vision, to live translations made possible by machine learning, AI is making every interface both simple and smart–and setting a high bar for how future experiences will work. AI is poised to act as the face of a company's digital brand and a key differentiator – and become a core competency demanding of C-level investment and strategy.

While it may feel novel to mess around with a customer service chatbot, there may come a day in the future where artificial intelligence, or AI, is the primary way you interact with companies. That's one of the big trends outlined in IT consulting firm Accenture's report, out today, on the technology that will change businesses in the next three years. Once tech like AI filters through the powers that be, it may very well land right in front of you, the consumer. Accenture surveyed more than 5,400 business and IT executives. And yes, AI and other technologies are on their minds.