Internal audit can play a key part in identifying and defending against risks from emerging technology such as the internet of things, and it also can aid in identifying opportunities such as how IoT can be used in sales distribution and inventory control, Jose Tabuena writes. Internal audit will face challenges, however, in keeping up with the rapid advancement of IoT and the resulting disruption, Tabuena writes.

Google have snapped up API.AI, a Silicon Valley startup specialising in building tools for natural language understanding in mobiles, web applications and devices. The details of the financial transaction have not been disclosed. Launched in 2014, API.AI quickly recognised the growing trend in companies interested in giving their technology a voice. "We've been constantly impressed by the fast and energetic adoption of the technology from people building conversational interfaces for chatbots, connected cars, smart home devices, mobile applications, wearables, services, robots and more," Ilya Gelfenbeyn, CEO of API.AI, said. The company's API works in three steps.

Even though the market for chatbots is still young, Europe seems to be already lagging behind. Ethical questions, data privacy, the fear of failure, and market uncertainty are only a few issues Europeans have. While the whole world is discussing the commercialization of artificial intelligence (A.I.) and chatbots and how the market is going to grow exponentially, Europe is once again taking the seat of the quiet, conservative observer for several reasons. One of the greatest concerns involves the fear of A.I. contesting with humans for their employment. Dr. Stuart Armstrong, an expert in the field of A.I. and an Oxford researcher, pointed out that these concerns are still highly hypothetical as we are still far away from the point where robots and A.I. will become smart enough to fully replace humans. Furthermore, research in 2011 by the International Federation of Robotics found that one million industrial robots powered by A.I. actually created nearly three million jobs for humans.

Deloitte's award-winning artificial intelligence platform continues to innovate financial statement audits by using advanced machine learning and natural language processing to extract key information from large volumes of audit evidence. FEI Daily spoke with Will Bible, an audit partner at Deloitte & Touche LLP, on innovating financial statement audits with artificial intelligence and how it will impact the world of finance, accounting and auditing. Will is presenting at this year's Current Financial Reporting Issues Conference, November 14-15, 2016 in New York City on the topic. Will Bible: To achieve automation and ubiquitous data analytics, you need data standardization. There's been a lot of progress on digitizing information, and automating processes around that digitized information.

Amid the wall-to-wall coverage of the U.S. presidential race, it was easy to miss the Obama administration's release this month of a slim, 48-page report titled "Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence." Yet the subject of the report -- and the changes it foreshadows -- may prove to be as consequential for our society, and our education system, as even the most high-stakes national election. The term "artificial intelligence" means different things to different people, but broadly speaking, it refers to computers and advanced machines that can think, reason and communicate like humans, respond to novel or nuanced situations as a person might, and most critically, learn from experiences as a human would. According to a recent survey, 80 percent of AI researchers believe that computers and advanced machines will eventually achieve levels of artificial intelligence that rival human intelligence. Moreover, half believe that this will happen by the year 2040 -- just one generation from now.

THE RISE OF ARTIFICIAL intelligence has inspired both fascination and fear of the world to come. Some tech prophets envision a "singularity," in which advances in AI trigger drastic technological growth, while others imagine that autonomous machines will someday turn on their creators and destroy us. But when you're engaged in the science of machine intelligence, you understand that this is a false set of choices shaped by a misleading phrase. The term "artificial intelligence" was coined in 1955 to convey the concept of general intelligence: the notion that all human cognition stems from one or more underlying algorithms, and that by programming computers to think in the same way, we could create autonomous systems modeled on the human brain. At the same time, other researchers were taking a different approach.

IBM Chief Executive Officer Ginni Rometty sees proprietary data combined with artificial intelligence technology as the competitive advantage for companies going forward. When International Business Machines Corp. works with clients, it trains a unique version of its artificial intelligence technology, Watson, using proprietary data, and that information creates individual business insights that stay with the customer, Rometty said. That's how Watson is different from its competitors that offer similar services around data analytics and machine learning, she said Wednesday in a speech at the company's World of Watson event in Las Vegas. "We made an important architectural decision -- for all our clients, all their data, it's their accumulated knowledge," she said. Rometty said clients have praised IBM's approach.

Artificial intelligence is learning to take on an increasing number of sophisticated tasks. Google Deepmind's AI is now able to imitate human speech, and just this past August IBM's Watson successfully diagnosed a rare case of leukemia. Rather than viewing these advances as threats to job security, we can look at them as opportunities for AI to fill in critical gaps in existing service providers, such as mental healthcare professionals. In the US alone, nearly eight percent of the population suffers from depression (that's about one in every 13 American adults), and yet about 45 percent of this population does not seek professional care due to the costs. There are many barriers to getting quality mental healthcare, from searching for a provider who's within your insurance network to screening multiple potential therapists in order to find someone you feel comfortable speaking with.

IBM's Watson supercomputing AI, which previously beat human competitors at Jeopardy and even edited its own magazine, is set to impart some of its wisdom to another automated system: Slack's chatbot. It's all part of IBM's new Watson Virtual Agent effort, which allows Watson's intelligence to be imparted to all sorts of human interface scenarios. While the idea of having conversations with artificial intelligence might seem like a gateway to a Skynet future, chatbots are seen as a massive growth industry in the coming years. Watson is ahead of the curve in this area, so applying its level of conversational ability to something like Slack makes a lot of sense. As it stands, Slack's helper bot is rather simplistic.

Apple has revealed its completely redesigned MacBook Pro, the computer that it hopes can put an end to worries that about its future. The company unveiled the laptop as part of an event at its California headquarters. It also showed off a new TV app – but didn't update any of its desktop computers, as many had hoped, and showed off no new categories of products. The new computer is thinner, lighter and differently shaped from the old MacBook Pro. But the main change is the new screen that's built into the keyboard.