Nexd today announced seed funding as well as beta availability of its artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics platform, designed to help B2B organizations measure, understand and take action to increase close rates, more effectively forecast sales pipelines and improve overall sales efficiency. The company is addressing one of today's biggest sales management challenges, an action gap, whereby teams frequently miss opportunities to engage and win prospects due to fragmented information spread across thousands of disparate enterprise and SaaS applications and tools. Nexd taps the power of big data, machine learning and predictive analytics to analyze every touch point related to the sales process--including millions of data points from apps and tools outside a company's CRM system--ultimately determining patterns of success as well as where breakdowns occur. The result is deeper intelligence, increased predictability and improved execution across the sales organization. "When we embarked down this path we saw an incredible opportunity to use analytics and artificial intelligence to make people more effective at work," said James Davison, Co-Founder at Nexd. "While we're initially focused on sales, due to its huge impact on the business, we envision the core platform with its guidance and recommendations capabilities will ultimately provide value to many other areas across an organization."

Machine learning and artificial intelligence have the ability to transform everything from transportation to medicine, but the industry has a long way to go to get to that point. Bloomberg Beta Partner Shivon Zilis and Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence CEO Oren Etzioni talked AI, robotics, machine learning, voice integration, online privacy and other futuristic topics at the GeekWire Summit 2016. The very agreeable pair concurred that AI and machine learning are showing up in a lot of applications and industries already, but the development of those concepts is in only the first inning of a nine inning game. Concern over job losses, and of course the fear over a great robot uprising is persists. But AI, Zilis and Etzioni said, has the potential to make people's lives better and even save lives.

Doctors will one day be able to more accurately predict how long patients with fatal diseases will live. Medical systems will learn how to save money by skipping expensive and unnecessary tests. Radiologists will be replaced by computer algorithms. These are just some of the realities patients and doctors should prepare for as "machine learning" enters the world of medicine, according to Dr. Ziad Obermeyer, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, and Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel of the University of Pennsylvania, who recently coauthored an article in the New England Journal of Medicine on the topic. But what exactly is "machine learning"?

More recently, research has suggested that quantum effects could offer similar advantages for the emerging field of quantum machine learning (a subfield of artificial intelligence), leading to more intelligent machines that learn quickly and efficiently by interacting with their environments. In a new study published in Physical Review Letters, Vedran Dunjko and coauthors have added to this research, showing that quantum effects can likely offer significant benefits to machine learning. "The progress in machine learning critically relies on processing power," Dunjko, a physicist at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, told Phys.org. "Moreover, the type of underlying information processing that many aspects of machine learning rely upon is particularly amenable to quantum enhancements. As quantum technologies emerge, quantum machine learning will play an instrumental role in our society--including deepening our understanding of climate change, assisting in the development of new medicine and therapies, and also in settings relying on learning through interaction, which is vital in automated cars and smart factories."

We stand in front of the 4th and largest wave of the industrial revolution, powered by AI and Data. This is the biggest opportunity so far for innovation and entrepreneurship, and every single industry will be disrupted and redefined by companies that are not even born yet. With the AI market projected to grow over 20 fold in the next 10 years to 3Tn annually, we believe Applied Artificial Intelligence represents one of the major wealth creation opportunities of this century. Any system that is not learning will soon die, and applying AI to new or existing systems will extend and accelerate societal improvement. AI-driven systems will soon be able to build better, more efficient products that scale and solve problems in ways that have not been possible before.

If humans are wary of AI in dominant roles, will we ever allow them to be truly useful and act on our behalf? A s far as misunderstood fictional artificial intelligence (AI) systems go, HAL 9000 from the 1968 book and film 2001: A Space Odyssey has gotten the most undeserved grief. Yes, HAL killed four of the five astronauts on its spaceship -- but it was just trying to follow instructions. HAL wasn't malevolent when it sent one astronaut tumbling into outer space, or when it refused to let another back into the space station, it simply found those methods to be the most elegant way to solve a problem it had been given. Should AI systems draw the line at murder?

There has been a lot of hype about Salesforce's Einstein software, a next-gen artificial intelligence (AI) feature that is being integrated with the firm's plethora of customer relationship management (CRM) tools. However, despite the organisation investing a lot of time into the solution, early users have suggested that it's not at a final stage and is unlikely to become a mainstream tool just yet. Einstein collects and analyses data in a more intelligent and smarter way, providing companies with increased insights and predictive analytics. This is important at a time when businesses have to utilise the vast amount of data at their fingertips to optimise and drive forward sales and growth. However, a number of early Einstein reviewers have said that the software needs further refinement to make the analytics of actual use.

Only nine states and Washington, D.C., have laws on the books related to autonomous vehicles. Olli, a self-driving bus, is set to debut in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Local Motors) SAN FRANCISCO - If you've got tech skills and are interested in self-driving cars, there's a good chance you'll wind up working in the Bay Area. Where jobs in the automotive field were once exclusively tied to Detroit, the mushrooming importance of software to mobility has seen employment opportunities migrate west as established automakers such as Ford Motor and Mercedes-Benz boost their ranks in Silicon Valley. That shift is borne out by data provided to USA TODAY by Paysa, a site that uses machine learning to provide salary information and career success insights for both job seekers and businesses. Over the past six months, dozens of companies looking for self-driving car talent posted more than 350 job listings, with 230 of those jobs based in either Mountain View or Palo Alto.

"If you don't innovate fast, disrupt your industry, disrupt yourself, you will be left behind." To orchestrate this transformation, organizations must revamp their IT strategies and roadmaps and ingest the value of artificial intelligence and enterprise resource planning (ERP) integration. These technologies go hand in hand because they cover the same spectrum. AI-enabled ERP solutions will by default impact the heart and soul of day-to-day operations. The mix of people, process and technology is going to change.

Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five and J.K.Rowling's series of Harry Potter novels describe the time travel paradox. Traveling through time changes the future from the point in time where the traveler arrived. The personal assistant that will arrive at some time in the future will change humans from that point in time forward, but in a more impactful way than GPS. Google and Facebook have recruited the best artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning talent in the world to build personal assistants in small increments. The personal assistant's intimate knowledge of users' likes and dislikes and awareness of situational context could be like Samantha depicted in the movie Her, but without an emotional relationship so users will not fall in love with their assistants.