Next week professional services firm Accenture will be launching a new tool to help its customers identify and fix unfair bias in AI algorithms. The idea is to catch discrimination before it gets baked into models and can cause human damage at scale. The "AI fairness tool", as it's being described, is one piece of a wider package the consultancy firm has recently started offering its customers around transparency and ethics for machine learning deployments -- while still pushing businesses to adopt and deploy AI. (So the intent, at least, can be summed up as: 'Move fast and don't break things'. "Most of last year was spent… understanding this realm of ethics and AI and really educating ourselves, and I feel that 2018 has really become the year of doing -- the year of moving beyond virtue signaling. And moving into actual creation and development," says Rumman Chowdhury, Accenture's responsible AI lead -- who joined the company when the role was created, in January 2017.

Though Booz Allen Hamilton may be a 104-year-old company, it still views itself on the forefront of the future. "We kind of built the management consulting business, so when we think about our clients' problems, we come at it from a consultative approach," said Gary Labovich, a Booz Allen executive vice president. The Booz Allen legacy is a major factor that has driven the company's success, said Labovich. The McLean, Virginia-based company holds the No. 6 spot on this year's Top 100 list with $4.1 billion in prime federal contracts. One of the many highlights for the organization this year was in February when the FDA named Booz Allen Hamilton an awardee of a $300 million contract to modernize the human drug review process.

It turns out that we might be at the perfect storm where how we store and access financial information combined with the maturation of tech capabilities are all in place to accelerate the digital transformation of accounting and finance. Just as others who faced the prospect of machines taking over jobs that used to be done by humans, accounting and finance professionals might anticipate the reality of 4th Industrial Revolution with fear. Actually, when machines take over repetitive, time-consuming and redundant tasks, it will free human finance professionals to do higher level and more lucrative analysis and counseling for their clients. Let's take a look at just of the few opportunities that are now available thanks to the digital transformation of accounting and finance. According to consulting firm Accenture, "automation, minibots, machine learning and adaptive intelligence are becoming part of the finance team at lightning speed."

The importance of artificial intelligence in the hiring process is growing. People share a lot of personal information with the web, information that translates to data. This data supports employers who are assessing how successful candidates will be in a position and how well they will fit within an organization. Now, artificial intelligence is transforming the hiring process. Currently, most businesses are using analytics and intelligence rather than true artificial intelligence.

Industry 4.0 signifies the promise of a new Industrial Revolution--one that marries advanced production and operations techniques with smart digital technologies to create a digital enterprise that would not only be interconnected and autonomous but could communicate, analyze, and use data to drive further intelligent action back in the physical world. It represents the ways in which smart, connected technology would become embedded within organizations, people, and assets, and is marked by the emergence of capabilities such as robotics, analytics, artificial intelligence and cognitive technologies, nanotechnology, quantum computing, wearables, the Internet of Things, additive manufacturing, and advanced materials. While its roots are in manufacturing, Industry 4.0 is about more than simply production. Smart, connected technologies can transform how parts and products are designed, made, used, and maintained. They can also transform organizations themselves: how they make sense of information and act upon it to achieve operational excellence and continually improve the consumer/partner experience.

It turns out that we might be at the perfect storm where how we store and access financial information combined with the maturation of tech capabilities are all in place to accelerate the digital transformation of accounting and finance. Just as others who faced the prospect of machines taking over jobs that used to be done by humans, accounting and finance professionals might anticipate the reality of 4th Industrial Revolution with fear. Actually, when machines take over repetitive, time-consuming and redundant tasks, it will free human finance professionals to do higher level and more lucrative analysis and counseling for their clients. Let's take a look at just of the few opportunities that are now available thanks to the digital transformation of accounting and finance. According to consulting firm Accenture, "automation, minibots, machine learning and adaptive intelligence are becoming part of the finance team at lightning speed."

Consulting firm KPMG have entered into an alliance with tech giant Google to provide customers with cybersecurity, regulatory compliance and business advisory solutions. As per the terms of the alliance, KPMG will be leveraging Google's Machine Learning (ML) technology to help their clients transform digitally. According to KPMG, organizations from different sectors such as financial services, insurance, healthcare etc. are looking for solutions pertaining cybersecurity, business process management, customer experience as well as compliance and regulation. They say that with the benefits provided by the cloud, migrating to a platform that enables these services will be a great business advantage. By partnering with Google, KPMG say that they will be creating a portfolio of industry solutions built on the Google Cloud Platform.

Leaders in cognitive and AI weigh in on what's working and what's next With all the talk about cognitive and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in business circles today, it's natural to wonder whether these capabilities are having any measurable impact. So we asked some of the most aggressive adopters of cognitive technologies how they have fared to date, focusing on 250 "cognitive-aware" leaders within "cognitive-active" companies. Not only can early-phase signals from such early adopters provide a view from the front lines of these important developments, but many other executives are simply not yet sufficiently knowledgeable about cognitive technologies. So what did these leaders tell us? Our survey results indicate that early adopters are bullish on cognitive and AI technologies, with expectations that they will transform both companies and entire industries.

"There's a lot of research in the direction of enabling human thoughts to be able to control computing devices and physical objects too. I always have a lot of writing to do. When I lay down to go to sleep, paragraphs just come to me. Wouldn't you like a device that would capture that flow of thoughts and store it somewhere -- put it on a screen, put it in Word?" -- Dan Olds, analyst at management consulting company OrionX. The meteoric rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) carries the potential for a future that includes perceptual computing.

In fact, the ability for machines to learn from experience, recognize patterns and perform tasks in human-like ways has big implications for businesses of all kinds and sizes. According to a 2017 report from MIT Sloan Management Review and the Boston Consulting Group, almost 85 percent of the business executives interviewed think that AI will enable their companies to either get or maintain a competitive advantage. But fewer than 39 percent of companies have an AI strategy in place, and only about one in five companies has incorporated AI in some kind of way. Reema Bhatia, co-founder of Stickboy Creative, a Fort Myers software development, website design and mobile app development company, says that Southwest Florida companies who don't think about how they can use AI run the risk of falling behind. "If they don't start predicting their customers' behavior, they're not going to be able to serve their customers better than their competition, and they're in danger of becoming obsolete," she says.