Artificial intelligence will have a dramatic impact on business by 2020, according to study released this week by IT services, consulting and business solutions provider Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). The firm's study, "Getting Smarter by the Day: How AI is Elevating the Performance of Global Companies," shows that 84 percent of the 835 executives TCS surveyed from North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America said their companies see the use of AI as "essential" to competitiveness. Artificial intelligence in the real world: What can it actually do? What are the limits of AI? And how do you go from managing data points to injecting AI in the enterprise?

Google Home, the search engine's rival to Amazon's Echo smart speaker, could finally be arriving in the UK. The technology giant launched the voice-activated device in the US last October but is yet to extend its release outside of the country. But a cryptic invitation sent out to members of the UK press suggests a product launch taking place at the end of March could be for the much anticipated device. Google Home (pictured) could finally be coming to the UK, if hints within a cryptic product launch announced by the search engine are to be believed. The invite, for an event dated March 28, asks journalists to'Please join us for some exciting announcements.'

Canada is bringing in strict measures and fines for recreational users of drones. Transport Minister Marc Garneau on Thursday announced restrictions to curb the number of incidents in which recreational drones have come too close to planes, which has more than tripled since 2014. Recreational drone operators must now mark their drone with their contact information and are forbidden to fly them at night or in cloudy conditions. Drones will no longer be allowed to fly higher than 90 meters (295 feet), within 75 meters (245 feet) of any buildings, vehicles or people, or within 9 kilometers (5.6 miles) of airports. Violators are subject to a fine of up to $3,000 Canadian (US$2,251), and up to $15,000 Canadian (US$11,256) for corporations.

Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban's prediction for the future of the workforce includes more robots and less human workers. Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban's prediction for the future of the workforce includes more robots and less human workers. "We're about to go into a period with artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, those things where we literally are going to see a change in the nature of employment," Cuban said in an interview with CNN's Jake Tapper. In that same interview, he criticized President Trump's leadership skills before calling Trump "technologically illiterate." He used that claim as a lunch point to discuss the swiftly evolving nature of jobs due to automation, using Trump's work with US factories to underscore his point.

Three months ago, Zoubin Ghahramani was a machine learning researcher at an under-the-radar startup. On Tuesday, Uber appointed him as its new chief scientist overseeing its Uber A.I. Labs, its new research arm dedicated to A.I. and machine learning. Here's what happened in the interim: In December 2016, Uber continued its aggressive push into artificial intelligence by acquiring A.I. startup Geometric Intelligence for an undisclosed amount. Ghahramani, a renowned machine learning researcher, was part of the 15-person Geometric Intelligence team absorbed in the acquisition. As part of the deal, Geometric CEO and founder Gary Marcus, a neural science professor at New York University and leading figure in A.I., became director of the A.I. Labs team at Uber based in San Francisco.

Advancements in AI, Big Data, the Internet of Things and automation have many industries worried that these systems will push them out, absorb their work, make humans redundant, or accelerate the speed of business too fast for them to adapt. From formal models of legal reasoning to automated information extraction from legal databases and texts, the interaction of artificial intelligence and law will disrupt the contemporary status of legal practice. With the latest'wonder automation' in the form of JP Morgan's COIN, building upon the adoption of AI systems by firms such as Clifford Chance, and development projects like Denton's NextLaw Labs leading the way, are lawyers set to be replaced? AI will spell the end of lawyers. However, the age of automation and digitisation gives birth to an even more beautiful legal specialist: the cyber-lawyer – an augmented specialist, combining the processing power of AI with powerful searches of legal indexes in mere seconds through Big Data, produced through a human interface.

The UK government statistics for 2016 reported that 65% of large firms detected a breach in the previous year, a quarter of which occurred at least once a month. More worryingly, a report by Gartner shows that 80% of all security incidents go undetected by the breached organisations, so the rates of cyber attack are higher than we realise. The costs of cyber attack can be crippling, as highlighted by the media in their coverage of the various incidences that have rocked the IT security world in the past few months. Seemingly robust and industry-leading organisations such as Yahoo have suffered large-scale hacks, while attacks on financial institutions provide very real examples of what customers and businesses stand to lose by being the victim of a cyber attack. When Tesco Bank was hacked in 2016, £2.5 million was stolen from customer accounts, and the recent Lloyds Bank attack saw 20 million customer accounts compromised.

Armando Gonzalez has got a problem. The CEO of Ravenpack, a company which uses artificial intelligence to turn news and social media into usable indicators for financial services firms, is struggling to hire one particular species of coder: Lisp (formerly known as LISP) specialists. There just aren't enough of them to go around. "We're very actively hiring in data science," says Gonzalez. "Our team is going to grow by 20% to 30% this year and we're looking for data science specialists and developers who work across everything from Python to Lisp, but Lisp professionals are very hard to find."

This blog follows as a full retraction from the earlier blog, "Chatbots will be smart but artificial intelligence doesn't exist yet," which claimed AI is not real or useful. It is both of those things and neither of them. Full retraction stated and received! "Chatbots will be smart, well-informed even but not artificially intelligent. Computers cannot think by themselves. They don't learn on their own. No!" That was the opening statement of the previous blog.

There are a lot of buzzwords thrown around when it comes to artificial intelligence, but not a lot of knowledge about what they are. One way of thinking about artificial intelligence is to define it simply as algorithms we don't quite understand yet. For example, 20 years ago finding point-to-point directions in something such as Google Maps would have been considered artificial intelligence. These days, pathfinding algorithms are a part of core curriculum for most computer science undergraduates. As algorithms advance, it's no longer seen that way.