Microsoft CEO says he wants to democratise artificial intelligence. MICROSOFT CEO Satya Nadella says the software giant is hellbent on ensuring the democratisation of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence, or machine intelligence, currently covers a broad range of somewhat modest capabilities in commercial technology such as voice recognition chatbots like Apple's Siri. When considering its ultimate potential some have famously described the pursuit of AI as summoning the demon but regardless of any fatalistic concerns for humankind, the pursuit of AI represents the most heated competition in the tech sector right now and holds the promise of unprecedented power. "We have set ourselves the goal of democratising AI," Mr Nadella told the audience during the keynote address at Microsoft's Ignite conference Tuesday morning AEST.

The group, officially named the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, or just Partnership on AI, is dedicated to address potential problems the rapid development of machine intelligence can raise, before those problems appear. The group encourages the sharing of ideas and research related to AI, as each multinational tech giant has its own AI prototype. The group states that it is dedicated to working with the public, to both educate about the benefits of the technology and to hear concerns, varying from job loss to -- potentially -- robot uprisings. The group will have corporate and non-corporate members in its projects and discussions, with research organizations, including the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, included. Funds and logistical support will be provided by the tech giants.

Today the banking industry faces a rebirth by necessity. As the digital age morphs into the cognitive era, success depends on radical transformation that enables the integration of advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, robotics, blockchains and more. For 64 percent of those surveyed in 2016, their organization's efficiency remained the same or declined over the last three years.Tapping huge quantities of dormant, bank-owned data, much of it unstructured, is essential to offering the individualized engagement that customers demand, transforming operations and benefitting from fintech innovation. How can you take advantage of these technologies to build a cognitive bank?

Tech companies are investing heavily in artificial intelligence, and touting the financial benefits of AI-powered technologies like robots, virtual assistants and augmented reality, Now, a new study reports that artificial intelligence could dramatically boost economic growth and productivity. The Accenture report looked at 12 countries and found that AI -- or technology that senses the environment, comprehends what's happening and takes action -- could increase productivity by up to 40 percent in 2035. The report also forecasts economic growth in the U.S. could increase from 2.6 percent to 4.6 percent over the same period with the adoption of AI technologies. Among the countries that stand to make the largest gains in productivity from AI in 2035 are Sweden, Finland, the U.S. and Japan. "The impact this has is that it automates a lot of the low-level tasks and gets them done with higher satisfaction," says Accenture's chief technology officer, Paul Daugherty.

Microsoft is pulling out all the stops to further its artificial intelligence research. After a string of social-geared announcements, Microsoft has expressed its intention to "democratize AI" for every person an organization. To do this, the company has formed the Microsoft Research and AI group. The research group will be comprised of over 5 thousand computer scientists and engineers focused on the company's artificial intelligence products, and will be led by Harry Shum. Shum is the executive vice president of technology and research at Microsoft who currently leads several research groups including those for Bing and Cortana, which are primarily focused on artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Google combines all of its cloud services under the'Google Cloud' brand -- Google for Work, Google's Cloud Platform and the rest of the company's cloud-based services are getting a new name. They have now been combined under the "Google Cloud" moniker. Google's Diane Greene made the announcement … Google changes'Google Apps for Work' to'G Suite,' adds more machine intelligence features Daniel Bader / Android Central: Daily brief: Android Weariness, Google Maps listens, and what the heck is LeEco? Jordan Novet / VentureBeat: Google reorganizes cloud services under new'Google Cloud' brand Stephanie Condon / ZDNet: Google announces tools to'democratize' machine learning Barb Darrow / @gigabarb: Honest to God, WHY did this take so long? Brett Crosby / @brettc: Ha, can't tell you how many times we tried to push the Google Cloud brand and got shut down.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming ubiquitous. With advances in technology, algorithms, and sheer compute power, it is now becoming practical to utilize AI techniques in many everyday applications including transportation, healthcare, gaming, productivity, and media. Simple and natural for humans, voice communication in everyday language continues to be one of the ultimate challenges for AI. Human conversation requires the ability to understand the meaning of spoken language, relate that meaning to the context of the conversation, create a shared understanding and world view between the parties, model discourse and plan conversational moves, maintain semantic and logical coherence across turns, and to generate natural speech. Today, we are pleased to announce the Alexa Prize, a 2.5 million university competition to advance conversational AI through voice.

Google announced a number of updates to its cloud computing services at a small event in San Francisco this morning. These updates touch Google's machine learning services, as well as its database and analytics services, and include an update to how it supports its users. The company's focus today, though, was clearly on machine learning. Google launched the private alpha of its machine learning services a few months ago and today, Google's infrastructure chief Urs Hoelzle announced that Cloud Machine Learning is now available to all businesses as a public beta. The service allows you to train machine learning models and promises that you can train models with terabytes of data within only a few hours.

Through a joint alliance on artificial intelligence, five tech giants need to take a better look at the guidelines established by one of the most influential writers of modern science fiction to protect us from an apocalyptic future. Fears of what autonomous technologies are capable of is entirely understandable, even though artificial intelligence is still in early stages. IBM, -0.11% and Microsoft Corp. MSFT, -1.09% have created an ethics-focused nonprofit that says it has goals such as educating the public, protecting the privacy and security of individuals, and to create a forum for discussion of the complex issues in a future with machines may be in decision-making roles. The Partnership on AIproposed a set of eight tenets to ensure that the use of AI is "beneficial to people and society." But the corporate-sounding tenets seem to be a trumped-up, yet still watered-down, version of the three fundamental "Rules of Robotics," as written by legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov.

IBM has agreed to buy Promontory Financial Group -- a consultancy so influential it has been dubbed the industry's "shadow regulator" -- in a move that could extend artificial intelligence into every aspect of banking. Under the deal, which was announced Thursday, Promontory's stable of ex-regulators and former industry executives will be tasked with teaching IBM's Watson to address risk management and compliance issues at banks. The goal is to create an AI capable of sifting through reams of data collected by banks to find potential problems and suggest solutions. "We can very quickly help financial institutions have a much more complete and continuously updated view of what the landscape is," Alistair Rennie, a general manager for industry solutions at IBM, said in an interview. "There are systems now that throw out alerts all the time. The work of going through which ones need follow-up and documentation is very manual and very inefficient. We believe we can absolutely solve that problem with a cognitive solution. We can make it far more effective, far more automated."