Manoj Saxena is the executive chairman of CognitiveScale and a founding managing director of The Entrepreneurs' Fund IV, a 100m seed fund focused exclusively on the cognitive computing space. Saxena is also a Special Advisor to IBM senior leadership where he focuses on operationalizing IBM's 100m Watson Cloud Ecosystem Fund and making side-by-side investments with the TEF IV fund. Saxena is also the chairman of two other startups in the cognitive computing space, WayBlazer and SparkCognition. Prior to joining TEF, Saxena was general manager, IBM Watson, where his team built the world's first cognitive systems in healthcare, financial services, and retail. He received the IBM Chairman's award for Watson commercialization and helped with the formation of Watson Business Group in January 2014 with a 1B investment from IBM. Saxena will be speaking on the subject of artificial intelligence at Gigaom Change Leaders Summit in Austin, September 21-23rd.

Say what you will about Google's AlphaGo AI, it generally turned up to its championship matches sober. Actually, most AI tend to stay away from the bottle – which makes sense given their lack of mouth, or digestive system, or sense of fun. One UK company is looking to change all that, though. IntelligentX's AI might not actually drink beer, but it is learning how to brew it thanks to machine-learning algorithms. It works like this: IntelligentX has made four different types of beer.

Robots could eventually play integral roles in labor wards, according to findings from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Robots are currently employed in hospitals to carry out simple actions, like dispensing medication. But can they understand patient needs and make scheduling decisions? The researchers have been working for the past two years to determine whether robots can be more than just helpful companions. They've been conducting experiments to see if a robot can serve as an effective "resource nurse." That's the nurse in the labor and delivery unit that's in charge of assigning other nurses to care for patients.

Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) co-founder Bill Gates recently called artificial intelligence "the holy grail that anyone in computer science has been thinking about" during Vox Media's Code Conference. Gates discussed the rapid progress of speech recognition and computer vision technologies over the past five years, and noted that "the dream is finally arriving." If that dream arrives, tech investors should recognize the major trends and players in this market. To get started, let's examine 10 fascinating facts about the AI industry. Research firm Markets and Markets estimates that the AI market will grow from 420 million in 2014 to 5.05 billion by 2020, thanks to the rising adoption of machine learning and natural language processing technologies in the media, advertising, retail, finance, and healthcare industries.

A digital shift in healthcare in recent years has paved the way for advances in automation, artificial intelligence and even surgical robots.

Ever since Ken Jennings got toasted on Jeopardy by "IBM Watson" in 2011, a host of incredible things have been happening in the world of Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and literally training super computers to learn. There have been a lot of "fits and starts" with artificial intelligence in the past 4 decades, but like it or not, it has only really arrived in the last 5 years. Computational power is off the charts compared to even a decade ago. Autonomous vehicles and robots did not exist on an actual road 5 years ago, with actual potential human driven cars; they were displayed in closely coordinated demonstrations, and up until last week, millions of miles were driven without a fatality. Bill Gates, who admittedly jumped the gun on AI in the 1990s, now believes, this is it in 2016.

Say what you will about Google's AlphaGo AI, it generally turned up to its championship matches sober. Actually, most AI tend to stay away from the bottle – which makes sense given their lack of mouth, or digestive system, or sense of fun. One UK company is looking to change all that, though. IntelligentX's AI might not actually drink beer, but it is learning how to brew it thanks to machine-learning algorithms. It works like this: IntelligentX has made four different types of beer.

A new artificial intelligence (AI) accelerator founded by a Hong Kong-born venture capitalist wants to bring Asia's best AI start-ups to the global stage. Dubbed Zeroth.ai, the AI accelerator was founded by Tak Lo, who most recently was a venture partner at Hong Kong venture capital company Mind Fund and a director at UK-based VC Techstars. "AI for me is something that will move the meter on technology in the next five to 10 years, there's no dispute about that," Lo said. The accelerator programme, which is currently accepting applications from AI start-ups in Asia, will officially begin in November this year. "I want to bring the wealth of experience and network from being a venture capitalist in New York and London to Asia and Hong Kong," Lo said.

We all know about the incredible progress that deep learning has made in recent years. The previous technological revolution, the Internet revolution, turned out pretty well. The world that the Internet created has turned out to be open --amazingly open, in fact, a world that empowers individuals like never before. Much like almost anyone today can create a web app, because the tools and technologies underlying the web are easy to use, open-source, completely free, and learning resources are available everywhere with an Internet connection --again, for free.

There is a set of important emerging digital trends I track as a futurist that are together converging very fast. These digital trends are all potentially disruptive, unless we plan ahead for the impact and change that is coming. More agility, smarter business processes and better productivity are the likely outcomes. Recently I gave a talk about my thinking that the Next Digital Disruption is big data and AI. I call it Big Data Intelligence.