As a salesperson, you learn to rely on intuition, charisma, and bonds forged over the course of a long customer relationship. Metrics, software, analytical tools: they're for marketers – the theory-formulators, the lead generators, the A/B-testers, the people who are there to tee you up so you can smash it across the green. Force of will and force of personality have taken you pretty far in the past, so why wouldn't they carry you forward into the future? It's a seductive myth, and more so because it was true until quite recently. Today, however, you can't rely on your gut or your way with people.

Let's say you couldn't remember the capital of Belgium. You could ask the computer what it is by saying'I want Paris, but subtract France and add Belgium.' The computer would return Brussels. Now imagine you could do that with employees. What if you could say'I want someone like my best engineer, but with more experience in management?'

Editor's Note: Last month, Dark Reading editors named Deep Instinct the most innovative startup in its first annual Best of Black Hat Innovation Awards program at Black Hat 2016 in Las Vegas. As you reach for a water bottle, you don't pause to analyze its material, size or shape in order to determine whether it's a water bottle. Instead, you immediately reach for it, with complete confidence in its identification. If I show the same water bottle to any traditional computer vision module, it will easily recognize it. If I partially obstruct the image with my fingers, then traditional computer vision modules will have difficulty recognizing it.

Earlier in the series, we discussed Salesforce's (CRM) operating segments' performance in its recently announced fiscal 2Q17 results. In its earnings release, Salesforce announced the introduction of "Salesforce Einstein," an AI (Artificial Intelligence) platform, at its upcoming annual 2016 Dreamforce conference. According to Salesforce, Einstein is "the world's first comprehensive artificial intelligence platform for CRM." The Salesforce Einstein platform has its foundation in different acquisitions the company has made in the past like RelateIQ, MetaMind, Implisit Insights, PredictionIO, and Tempo, as the above chart shows. Salesforce stated, "We've been able to stitch all this together and focus on AI. AI is the next wave of our industry and has resulted in a machine learning team of more than 175 data scientists who have built this amazing Einstein platform."

If you train a machine learning algorithm on real data from the world we live in, it will pick up on these biases,

At TellusLabs, we use satellite imagery and other earth data to deliver actionable insights to customers in agriculture, water, forestry, energy, and many other sectors. While some of this imagery has been collected since the 1970s (the Landsat program), only in the last decade has it been opened for free use in public and commercial domains. This democratization of satellite data empowers industry, academia, and government sectors, worldwide, with access to earth observation research and insights. This spaceborne perspective is also beautiful -- in this post, we combine some amazing scenes of agriculturally active areas (like this scene below from Storm Lake, Utah) with a little more detail on how this whole process works. As compelling as these images are, there is a wide gap between pixel values and a useful signal.

Businesses of today are constantly on the lookout for ways to radically transform their operational efficiencies. Digitization of business processes, technologies and products has enabled them to integrate methods to not only lower their costs, but to meet customer expectations in novel and customized ways. The one driver that many enterprises are wholeheartedly adopting now is Robotic Process Automation (RPA). With the help of robotics, enterprises can improve the physically measurable outcomes of manufacturing facilities, and also enhance their virtual operations to deliver the best results. In the simplest terms, RPA is the application of software robots that can interpret the functioning of existing applications and then imitate them with higher precision and fewer errors.

Stepsize is a UK startup focused on developer tools. The firm is aiming to put a degree of Artificial Intelligence (AI) into DevOps. Stepsize Layer is a desktop application for developers that automatically adds context to code bases. It does this by hooking up tools used to develop software, structuring historical data and attaching this to the piece of code. This email address is already registered.

An unstoppable wave of automation is transforming the workplace. While many low-skill jobs are being eliminated, positions demanding higher skills are being created. Most jobs in existence today will add and lose specific functions in the future as robots and other forms of technology take on routine tasks and free humans to focus more on creative and analytic efforts, according to experts. It will be a messy transition. It will be particularly painful for workers who lose their jobs and for employers that fail to recognize where automation fits into their operations.

The release goes on, "The team led by Wong and Jenny C. Chang, M.D., director of the Houston Methodist Cancer Center used the AI software to evaluate mammograms and pathology reports of 500 breast cancer patients. The software scanned patient charts, collected diagnostic features and correlated mammogram findings with breast cancer subtype. Clinicians used results, like the expression of tumor proteins, to accurately predict each patient's probability of breast cancer diagnosis. In the United States, 12.1 million mammograms are performed annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Fifty percent yield false positive results, according to the American Cancer Society (ACS), resulting in one in every two healthy women told they have cancer. Currently, when mammograms fall into the suspicious category, a broad range of 3 to 95 percent cancer risk, patients are recommended for biopsies… The Houston Methodist team hopes this artificial intelligence software will help physicians better define the percent risk requiring a biopsy, equipping doctors with a tool to decrease unnecessary breast biopsies."