What will "the new normal" look like for our HR leaders as we approach 2020? It's been nine years since McKinsey & Company coined the phrase, 'the new normal," referring to the fundamental changes in the business landscape following the Great Recession of 2008. We are witnessing revolutionary, not just incremental change. As Paul Daugherty said in his best selling book, "Human Machine: Re-imagining Work in the Age of AI," the workplace experience is changing in profound ways. According to research conducted by Accenture and the World Economic Forum, 87% of workers polled believe new technologies like artificial intelligence will improve their work experience and they are willing to invest their free time over the next few years to learn new skills to supplement their current ones.

Accenture will provide live demos of Ella and Ethan at the Accenture Dreamforce booth #1500, between Sept. 25 and Sept. 28. Click here to learn more about the Accenture Intelligent Patient Platform and additional AI capabilities that have been designed to enable a change in how healthcare organizations are using advanced analytics to drive unique clinical and economic value. Salesforce, Health Cloud, Einstein and others are among the trademarks of salesforce.com,

According to the report, global GDP could be up to 14 percent higher in 2030 as a result of AI. This is the equivalent of an additional USD 15.7 trillion – making it the biggest commercial opportunity in today's fast changing economy. Of this, USD 6.6 trillion is likely to come from increased productivity and USD 9.1 trillion from consumption side effects, the report shows. Accordingly, growth will be driven by three factors: productivity gains from businesses automating processes (including use of robots and autonomous vehicles); productivity gains from businesses augmenting their existing labour force with AI technologies (assisted and augmented intelligence) and increased consumer demand resulting from the availability of personalised and/or higher-quality AI-enhanced products and services. Over the past decade, almost all aspects of how we work and how we live – from retail to manufacturing to healthcare – have become increasingly digitised, the report notes.

In the China model, a nation leverages its large population and low costs to build a base of blue-collar manufacturing. It then steadily works its way up the value chain by producing better and more technology-intensive goods. In the India model, a country combines a large English-speaking population with low costs to become a hub for outsourcing of low-end, white-collar jobs in fields such as business-process outsourcing and software testing. If successful, these relatively low-skilled jobs can be slowly upgraded to more advanced white-collar industries. Both models are based on a country's cost advantages in the performance of repetitive, non-social and largely uncreative work -- whether manual labor in factories or cognitive labor in call centers.

Smart technology is as much a threat to strategy consulting as it is proving to be to Wall Street. This article is part of an MIT SMR initiative exploring how technology is reshaping the practice of management. We all understand that AI is a disruptive force in the market, but it still takes some convincing for many of us to accept just how deeply AI will affect even highly skilled knowledge-based industries. Management consulting offers a prime example. A $250 billion industry filled with some of the smartest people on the planet, consulting tends to view itself as an elite, untouchable echelon of the business world. But it is vulnerable to the same market forces that are disrupting services everywhere.

Be it the steam engine, electric bulb, computer, or robot, machines have been at the core of industrialization evolution from the late 18th century through today's Industry 4.0. They have been there for us when volume and coverage mattered. However, this digital economy, accelerated by automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence, demands a delivery paradigm vastly different from the conventional one. This new machine first model for delivery will be hinged on human-machine collaboration. Human ingenuity, together with machine precision and power will, be the guiding force for elevated growth and success in this Business 4.0TM era.

The Artificial Intelligence Week Middle East conference has wrapped up in Dubai, with PwC and Accenture among the sponsors and exhibitors featuring at the two-day event. Covering the banking & finance, government, and healthcare sectors, the Artificial Intelligence Week Middle East conference was held over the 4th and the 5th at the Park Hyatt in Dubai, featuring exhibitions, networking, pitches, and talks from some of the regional leaders in the field, including Xavier Anglada, Accenture Digital Lead for MENAT, and Stephen Anderson, Clients & Markets Leader for PwC Middle East. PwC in the Middle East, the event's official AI Consulting Sponsor & Partner, presented its recent annual AI report for the delegates in attendance, outlining the projected $96 billion boost to the United Arab Emirates' GDP by 2030 through the implementation of AI technologies – part of the $15.7 trillion possible worldwide windfall, and representing a 13.6 percent contribution to the UAE's overall GDP. Accenture – the AI event's Lead Digital Transformation Partner – has itself predicted huge gains for the UAE economy through AI adoption, amounting to some $182 billion in gross value add by 2030, while Accenture and PwC between them point to sizeable potential opportunities in the financial services, utilities, healthcare, education, transport, manufacturing and retail sectors. Unsurprisingly perhaps, consumer goods CEOs in the UAE are among the world's most enthusiastic for AI according to a further recent report by KPMG.And not just consumer goods CEOs in the UAE, but both wider industry and the government and public spheres are ready to embrace artificial intelligence – at least, if the line-up of AI tech conferences being held in the Emirates is anything to go by, with among others the Artelligence Forum having taken place in Dubai in April and the World AI show scheduled again in the city for April of next year.

The fact that increasingly complex automation is applied to problems that were solved entirely by humans opens the door to great opportunities but also to fallouts and shortcomings. According to consulting firm Accenture, American companies are expected to invest 35 trillion dollars in cognitive technologies before 2035, and that does not take into account other big players, such us Europe, China or Japan. Governments, such the French, are recognizing the importance of AI for the economy and the society. In Spain, the Ministry of Digital Agenda (Minetad) has created a group of experts that is working on a White Paper on AI.

Incremental steps in exploring artificial intelligence now can position organizations to pounce on a powerful array of machine-powered capabilities in the future. In March 2016, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and I asked 193 AI researchers how long it would be until we achieve artificial superintelligence (ASI), defined as an intellect that is smarter than the best human in practically every field. Of the 80 respondents, 67.5 percent said it could take a quarter century or more, and 25 percent said it would likely never happen. Given the sheer number of "AI is coming to take your job" articles appearing across media, these survey findings may come as a surprise to some. Yet they are grounded in certain realities.

Artificial intelligence has been the domain of science fiction for decades -- think HAL, the computer in "2001: A Space Odyssey" -- but as many people know, it's actually established well-developed and growing roots in modern-day life. Amazon's Echo, Netflix's recommendation engines, Facebook's facial recognition technology, auto-braking on cars, it's all based on the ability to analyze massive amounts of data in near real-time and being able to mimic human behavior based on the results. AI and its various subsegments -- like machine learning and deep learning -- are also reaching deep into the enterprise, helping to automate many of the tasks that now are done manually, creating greater efficiencies, reducing errors and offering valuable new insights into the massive amounts of data being generated. In a dynamic and fast-changing market like manufacturing, systems that can learn and adapt on their own will be crucial in driving the next-generation flexible environments. According to Accenture, 85 percent of executives plan to invest in AI technologies over the next three years.