For all the focus manufacturers have been placing on digitisation, and especially on intelligent automation technologies, AI has yet to have a significant impact on the factory floor. This is about to change, believes Harald Bauer of McKinsey. "Until now, AI has been applied in a few niche areas by some, though by no means all, manufacturers," he says. "The enablers are in place, however, to allow more manufacturers to apply AI in a wide range of uses, and at scale." These enablers include high existing levels of digitisation and automation, the availability of voluminous data and access to the enormous computing power existing in the cloud.

Flying cars, augmented reality glasses and contact lenses that can detect diabetes: They're all innovations born out of Google X, the skunkworks division of Alphabet. Three years ago Spanish telco giant Telefónica established Alpha, a lab in Barcelona staffed by around 100 people, working in stealth on innovative technology that holds the promise of a potential new revenue streams. The person running all things AI at the lab is Pascal Weinberger, 21. Weinberger is originally from Germany and like many other computer programmers is self-taught. He dropped out of a bachelor's degree, having "enrolled to keep my parents happy," but by 15 had already taken several remote courses in programming at MIT.

Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei is driving the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to build smart cities. At Huawei Connect 2018 in Shanghai, China, the company held a Smart City Summit with the theme "Activate Intelligence to Build Better Smart Cities". It featured discussions with industry experts and smart city practitioners on how to build new smart cities using AI. "Huawei is committed to becoming a smart city enabler and promoter by providing a city nervous system," said Zheng Zhibin, president of the global smart city business department at Huawei Enterprise. "Currently, Huawei is developing a ' AI Smart City Digital Platform' which is built upon the strategy of'Platform Ecosystem'.

Will black box AI fly?Andy Kelly on Unsplash enhanced by CogWorld With current advances in technology and Artificial Intelligence, most major companies are going to great lengths to attract the right talent and showcase their expertise in the field. Today having a futurist among its top rank management is not an eccentric fad, but a competitive necessity. Google is well-known for its collaboration with Ray Kurzweil. While we all know about the AI conquests of IBM, Amazon and Google, less is being revealed about machine learning projects in the "traditional" industry of telecom operators. Coming from a telecommunications background, I thought the balance should be restored.

Huawei has announced two new chips for artificial intelligence applications. The Ascend AI IP and chip series, the world's first AI IP and chip series that natively serves all scenarios, providing optimal TeraOPS per watt. The Ascend series delivers excellent performance per watt in every scenario, whether it's minimum energy consumption or maximum computing power in data centers. Their unified architecture also makes it easy to deploy, migrate, and interconnect AI applications across different scenarios. The Ascend 910 and Ascend 310 chips, which were announced at today's event, mark Huawei's leading AI capabilities at the chip level – the bottom layer of the stack.

Technology giant Huawei aims to help train one million artificial intelligence (AI) talents in the next three years to boost the fast-expanding sector. Huawei will provide free online training, organise boot camps and collaborate with industry players. It will also set up a one billion yuan (S$199 million) fund for universities and research institutes to support AI talent development. Mr Zheng Yelai, Huawei's vice-president and president of its cloud business unit, announced this yesterday, the last day of the Huawei Connect Conference in Shanghai. The move is in line with China's push to become a global AI powerhouse in the next decade.

Mobile carriers and industry pundits can gush all they want about the wonders of 5G. But blinding-fast downloads and self-driving cars mean little to consumers if they're either fearful or ignorant of the technology. Those are two of the top marketing challenges facing the telecommunications industry as it begins the rollout of fixed and mobile 5G, a new consumer survey suggests. According to the poll, conducted in September by RepeaterStore, a San Francisco systems integrator and cellular equipment reseller, most consumers (59 percent) aren't aware of 5G's impending arrival, and 38 percent couldn't care less. More disconcerting for carriers: Nearly one out of three respondents (30 percent) believe cell signals cause cancer.

Shanghai: By 2025, the global Artificial Intelligence (AI) market is expected to reach $380 billion, 90 per cent of which will come from the enterprise market, a Huawei official said here. "Naturally, we believe that industry applications will be key to the success of AI over the next decade," William Xu, Director of the Board and Chief Strategy Marketing Officer, said in his keynote address on the second day of the Huawei Connect 2018. He said that Huawei plans to support one million AI developers and partners over three years. "Helping industries go digital is not something that any company can do on its own. To effectively go digital, industries and industry organizations need to work together," he said.

Chinese technology giant Huawei is taking its AI strategy up a gear in a bid to seize the throne from Silicon Valley incumbents. During HUAWEI CONNECT 2018 in Shanghai, the company announced how it will take on the likes of Nvidia and Qualcomm. The first part of that strategy is new hardware. Huawei unveiled new chipsets it's calling the Ascend 910 and Ascend 310. These chips are both designed for AI but target different use cases.

Huawei has unveiled an AI strategy and a portfolio of supporting products built on two new microchips, which the telecoms giant claims is the world's first AI IP and chip series designed for a full range of deployment scenarios. The Ascend 310 is designed for the low-power computing needs of smart devices and the Ascend 910 for cloud computing. Huawei's rotating chairman Eric Xu said the Ascend 910 has "greatest computing density in a single chip," but denied that it was designed to provide direct competition for the likes of Qualcomm and Nvidia. "As Huawei does not sell chips directly to third party companies, if you're talking about pure chip-vendors, there is never competition between Huawei and them," Xu explained at the Huawei Connect conference in the Shanghai World Expo Exhibition and Convention Center. "We provide hardware and cloud services so if it's a hardware company or a cloud service company, there is competition here."