Our Bionic Factory is a centre of expertise focused on AI, data engineering and intelligent automation. This centre will help you tap into additional forms of capital (Behavioral and Cognitive) as you move towards being a Bionic Organization and outperform others that rely solely on more traditional types of capital (Financial, Natural Resources, Human). SCALE.AI is a super cluster dedicated to building the next-generation supply chain and boosting industry performance through AI technologies. Close to 120 partners, including PwC Canada, have joined forces to create this Canadian innovation consortium.

Heat, the full-service advertising agency possessed by Deloitte, started Heat AI, a model practice that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to discover online trends and conversations and these are predicted to grow up in popularity 72 hours before they peak -- with 70% exactness. For the prediction of social trends, Heat AI's proprietary technology utilizes patented algorithms to grasp, combine and analyze 100 million posts every day from 50,000 sources, with social, news sites and blogs. Every half an hour, the platform performs 1 million multi-dimensional predictions so as to recognize the trends and keywords which will increase in engagement, notifying both keyword recommendations and creative. "Artificial intelligence has the potential to completely reinvent the advertising industry, but until now, no one has employed AI-derived predictive insights to develop impactful, emotionally resonant creative. Heat is changing that," said Jocelyn Lee, co-head of Heat AI and specialist leader, Deloitte Consulting LLP.

Because algorithms "learn" from historical data, some companies have launched bots that simply replicate ethnic stereotypes and bias-filled decisions made by humans. Build processes and train teams to look for biases in data and machine learning models. Involve your board of directors - unintended consequences of AI could pose compliance risks and damage your brand.

IRISH BUSINESSES ARE lagging behind when it comes to investment in artificial intelligence, according to a new report by one of the Big Four professional services firms. A survey by PwC highlights a lack of clarity among businesses on how to plan for an AI future and the challenges with accessing and re-training talent. Conducted with the Analytics Institute, PwC surveyed 100 executives and high-ranking employees at companies of mixed sizes, including firms with revenues of less than €10 million and those with revenues of more than €5 billion. This relatively small sample size covered various industries but more than 93% were outside of IT with the replies benchmarked against US data. PwC has put together six priorities that need to be addressed by industry and government in Ireland: clarity, strategy, data, skills, trust and convergence, or how AI integrates with other technologies.

Deloitte Global announced that Deloitte firms are now offering clients an artificial intelligence (AI) platform. The platform can monitor, measure, and analyze changes in tax regulation in real-time to give Deloitte clients the edge in monitoring and responding to regulatory updates across the world. The AI platform is the result of a collaboration between Deloitte firms and Signal A.I. Signal's proprietary AI technology was trained by Deloitte tax experts to understand key regulatory changes in over 100 jurisdictions from over 100 regulators, tax authorities and government bodies. "Tax professionals are being asked to do more with fewer resources--to stay ahead of more risks, draw insights from more data, track more regulations across more jurisdictions. To address these challenges, they are transforming how they operate and manage processes by implementing new technologies, such as AI, robotic process automation and natural language processing," says Conrad Young, Deloitte Global Tax & Legal, Chief Digital Officer.

JDA Software and KPMG LLP recently published a wide-ranging survey regarding supply-chain technology. The main takeaway: end-to-end visibility is the No. 1 priority. But in order to make this a reality, the survey also notes that AI (Artificial Intelligence), machine learning (ML) and cognitive analytics will be critical. Yet pulling this off is far from easy and fraught with risks. Well, I recently had a chance to talk to Dr. Michael Feindt.

A growing number of businesses are seeking to apply artificial intelligence (AI) to innovate customer experience and launch disruptive products. If your company is among them, you will need to label massive amounts of text, images, and/or videos to create production-grade training data for your machine learning (ML) models. That means you'll need smart machines and skilled humans in the loop. "Firms achieve the most significant performance improvements when humans and machines work together," wrote Paul Daugherty and Jim Wilson in Harvard Business Review, about their research at Accenture involving 1,500 companies. "Through such collaborative intelligence, humans and AI actively enhance each other's complementary strengths: the leadership, teamwork, creativity, and social skills of the former, and the speed, scalability, and quantitative capabilities of the latter."

Arvind Gupta, Partner and Head, Management Consulting, KPMG in India, explains why HR functions are still reluctant to use AI, the co-effect of workplace culture and digital transformation on each other and the CIO's role in all of this. Edited excerpts: What factors are causing reluctance in adopting AI in HR functions? One of the main challenges that see's reluctance is the fact that employees' data are not present in one single location. In most cases, the data is distributed over many different data sets; and often the absence of one set in the analytics could lead to a totally wrong estimation. Another challenge is that the world of HR is not one where black and white decisions work.

A bigger issue to overcome is the building of trust and confidence in AI. Executives interviewed as part of our 2019 AI Predictions report suggested that ensuring AI systems are trustworthy is their top challenge for the year ahead. And according to our 22nd PwC CEO Survey, 82% of business leaders agree AI-based decisions need to be explainable in order to be trusted. While the overall feeling is that it will create opportunity, opinions vary when it comes to the impact of AI on job figures. In'How will automation impact jobs?' PwC reports that the net impact will be roughly flat, with significant variation by sector.

In 1888, the London-based accounting firm that became PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) faced a major technological upheaval thanks to the Burroughs adding machine. The first-ever mechanized calculator, an invention by William Seward Burroughs, cut the time to perform accounting tasks in half, and PwC's hundreds of workers had to quickly master the new system, or get left in the dust. Today, PwC isn't simply an accounting firm--now it's a global consultancy with 250,930 employees in 158 countries, raking in $43.1 billion in revenue in 2018--but once again it, along with thousands of other companies, faces a seismic technological shakeup with the advent of AI and other advanced technologies. It's rising to meet the challenge by preparing its workers to use digital technologies at all levels, from entry-level staff to C-suite executives. And it's not alone in its reskilling push--AT&T, IBM, Walmart and other forward-leaning companies also have major retraining programs underway.