It is hard to find any technology article these days that does not have some reference to artificial intelligence (AI). While one writer touts the amazing powers of AI for good, others are equally passionate with warnings of its potential to destroy the world. It is not often that one topic creates such polarized opinions from equally learned and visionary people. So what is a business leader to do when faced with the inevitable decisions about adopting AI in their enterprise? Like every major innovation, AI can be used for evil as well as for good. But for most businesses, bringing in AI based tools will not be a choice but a necessity.

Microsoft Corp. executive Qi Lu, a key architect of Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella's strategy for artificial intelligence and bots, is leaving the company due to health issues, the software giant said Thursday. Lu was a respected technologist who ran both the Office and search groups in his eight years at the company, following about a decade at Yahoo! Inc. and a stint at IBM Corp. He was injured in a biking accident and is leaving due to related health reasons, ReCode reported earlier. With Lu's departure in October, Microsoft is creating a new AI research group, to be led by 20-year company veteran Harry Shum, whose career has spanned leadership roles across research and Bing engineering. The group will bring together 5,000 computer scientists and engineers executives, including leaders from Cortana, Bing, ambient computing and robotics, Microsoft said in a statement.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's new big idea is the "democratization of artificial intelligence," as in the concept that everybody should have access to AI and AI-powered technology. But to get there, it's meant taking a lot of Microsoft's considerable investments in academic AI science, and turning them into real products that people can actually use, like Skype Translate and Windows Hello. To accelerate that unification of research and product, Microsoft has announced the formation of the new AI and Research Group -- a new organization within Microsoft that combines the Microsoft Research teams with the teams responsible for the Cortana digital assistant, the Bing search engine, and other AI-adjacent products. Leading the new Microsoft AI and Research Group and it's now-5,000-strong team is Harry Shum, previously the head of Microsoft Research, and one of Nadella's direct reports. "Today's move to bring research and engineering even closer will accelerate our ability to deliver more personal and intelligent computing experiences to people and organizations worldwide," Shum says in a press release.

Despite escalating industry pressure for approval of package-delivery drones, safety experts and federal documents indicate widespread flights aren't likely before the next decade. U.S. aviation authorities only recently kicked off the formal, time-consuming process of defining the types of collision-avoidance systems considered essential for such operations to receive broad regulatory authorization. Drafting the technical standards is projected to take three or four years, envisioning a suite of ground-based and airborne sensors that haven't yet been developed. Even strong proponents of unmanned aerial vehicles predict that delivering packages to individual customers probably won't gain significant momentum until at least roughly 2020. "It's not outside the realm of possibility that by the end of the decade, we could see more routine uses" of package-delivery drones, according to Paul McDuffee, co-chair of the federal standards-setting panel and a high-ranking official with Boeing Co. BA -0.13 % 's drone-making unit, Insitu Inc.

Microsoft is combining its Cortana, Bing, and Ambient Computing and Robotics engineering teams with part of its Microsoft Research team to create a new Microsoft AI and Research Group. The newly formed group, unveiled on September 29, will have more than 5,000 people focused on Microsoft's AI product work all-up, and will be headed by Executive Vice President Harry Shum. The new group will handle AI product engineering, basic and applied research and Microssoft's New Experiences and Technologies (NExT) team. Microsoft has been honing its AI focus as of late, emphasizing the company's multi-faceted work in agent technologies (Cortana); increased built-in intelligence in its apps and bots; machine-learning and cognitive services; and infrastructure, specifically around some of its work around field-programmable gate-array technologies and other related Azure cloud work.

The new partnership comes as its members increasingly use artificial intelligence to compete with one another in categories such as consumer electronics and business productivity software. It appears to be aimed, at least in part, at dispelling and defusing public concerns about artificial intelligence, a phrase that often inspires both rational and irrational fears. The rational ones include the prospect of economic dislocation and loss of jobs, while irrational ones--or at least premature ones--embrace science-fiction scenarios, in which robots rule the earth or society confronts the so-called singularity.

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The proliferation of robots completing manual tasks traditionally done by humans suggests we have entered the machine automation age. And while nothing captures the imagination like self-directing machines shuttling merchandise around warehouses, most automation today comes courtesy of software bots that perform clerical tasks such as data entry. Here's the good news: Far from a frontal assault on cubicle inhabitants, these software agents may eventually net more jobs than they consume, as they pave the way for companies to create new knowledge domain and customer-facing positons for employees, analysts say. The approach, known as robotic process automation (RPA), automates tasks that office workers would normally conduct with the assistance of a computer, says Deloitte LLP Managing Director David Schatsky, who recently published research on the topic. RPA's potential will grow as it is combined with cognitive technologies to make bots more intelligent, ideally increasing their value to businesses.

Software giant SAP, British AI startup BenevolentAI and the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne have become Europe's first users of our new NVIDIA DGX-1 AI supercomputer. This "plug and play" system -- loaded with powerful GPUs and special software for deep learning -- has been designed to help data scientists innovate and get to market faster with AI applications. Enterprise software giant SAP is now using DGX-1 AI supercomputers at its German and Israeli offices, where its teams are building machine learning solutions for SAP's 320,000 customers. In the U.K., BenevolentAI will use DGX-1 as part of its effort to accelerate drug discovery by using deep natural language processing, machine learning and artificial intelligence to formulate new, usable knowledge from complex scientific information. "For the current application of our AI technology in the bioscience space, it will mean that new drug discoveries can be made faster and more efficiently than ever before," said BenevolentAI co-founder and Director Ken Mulvany.

REDMOND, Washington -- Sept. 29, 2016 -- Microsoft Corp. announced on Thursday it has formed the Microsoft AI and Research Group, bringing together Microsoft's world-class research organization with more than 5,000 computer scientists and engineers focused on the company's AI product efforts. The new group will be led by computer vision luminary Harry Shum, a 20-year Microsoft veteran whose career has spanned leadership roles across Microsoft Research and Bing engineering. Microsoft is dedicated to democratizing AI for every person and organization, making it more accessible and valuable to everyone and ultimately enabling new ways to solve some of society's toughest challenges. Today's announcement builds on the company's deep focus on AI and will accelerate the delivery of new capabilities to customers across agents, apps, services and infrastructure. In addition to Shum's existing leadership team, several of the company's engineering leaders and teams will join the newly formed group including Information Platform, Cortana and Bing, and Ambient Computing and Robotics teams led by David Ku, Derrick Connell and Vijay Mital, respectively.