La Playa's specialist Science & Tech team can help you protect your business with smart, flexible, high-performance insurance - with a friendly human UI. We understand the risks and pressures you face - and we speak your language. We'll support you with great advice - helping you make good decisions for your business. Tech-based business is 24/7, global and borderless, exposing you to new risks and liabilities - often in unfamiliar places. As the law struggles to keep pace with technology, insurance can provide a real safety net if you fall foul of changing legislation.

Keen Footwear sells its iconic boots, shoes and sandals through thousands of retailers worldwide. But the Oregon manufacturer, which is working hard to honor its commitment to become "American Built," does not have the manpower to support a dedicated information security staff. With a team of six information technology professionals -- all but two focused on handling the day-to-day client issues of its 450 employees -- the IT staff would fall behind in triaging incidents the company's security software flagged. "We fit squarely in the realm that we have the problems of all the big players, but we don't have the resources of a large enterprise," said Clark Flannery, Keen's director of IT in Portland. To solve the problem, Flannery augmented his IT staff with machines.

China's government is preparing for a war of sorts with the United States to claim the vantage point to define the technological trend for the next generation. At the annual meeting of China's parliament this week, the usual Communist Party agenda of economic growth, social welfare, jobs, health care and pension made way for an unusual addition: a clarion call by some of China's most influential business and technology leaders for the government to set policies to define what they consider the Next Big Thing. They include the founder of the largest Chinese internet search engine Baidu, the owner of smartphone maker Xiaomi, and the founder of Geely Automobile, which bought Volvo. They are tabling motions and proposals for the government to take the lead in getting Chinese enterprises to collaborate on artificial intelligence (AI) research, and facilitate the industrialising of the technology. AI made its way into Premier Li Keqiang's March 5 work report, a signal that it has caught the attention of China's top decision makers.

Data for the enterprise is now a currency of its own, yet many companies and institutions are still trying to navigate the moving of large volumes of data from on-premise to the cloud in an effort to capitalize on the value of data stored in many locations. "I think longer-term the economic advantage of using cloud environments are undeniable. The cost advantages of hosting information in the cloud, the benefits that come from the scalability of those environments is far surpassing capabilities that organizations can invest in themselves or their own data centers," said Paul Scott-Murphy, vice president of product management, big data/cloud, at WANdisco Inc. During the Google Cloud Next event, Scott-Murphy spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's mobile live streaming studio, at SiliconANGLE's Palo Alto, CA, studio to discuss the trends WANdisco is seeing with its customers, as well as news from Google Cloud Next. WANdisco's enterprise and institutional customers are all facing similar problem: The availability of data and the combination of where it is stored makes it difficult to access and derive any benefits for them.

Watson captured the public imagination about artificial intelligence after defeating two world champions of Jeopardy in 2011 and bringing home a $1 million prize. Since then, Watson has gained new cognitive capabilities through APIs like Alchemy (for sentiment analysis), Tone Analyzer (for personality and emotional analysis), and Conversation (a chatbot builder) and has been embedded in hundreds of applications across financial services, healthcare, retail, and digital. "Chances are, you've interacted with Watson without realizing it," says Alyssa Simpson, Program Director at IBM Watson. "Many companies hide their use of the technology for competitive reasons. They don't want a competitor to buy it too."

This is the second of three stories in a mini-series on how artificial intelligence is affecting the work that agencies do. The next installment will publish on Friday. As marketer interest in artificial Intelligence (AI) grows, Publicis.Sapient sees opportunity to provide guidance. It has a dedicated unit that provides AI-related advice for 30 clients, including Patrón and Dove soap. The AI practice informally launched about four years ago and has seen an uptick in spend over the past year and a half, said Josh Sutton, global head of AI at Publicis.Sapient.

Fintech startups looking to disrupt payday lending are using artificial intelligence to make loans with rates as low as 6% and with default rates of 7% or less. AI can make a difference on several fronts, the startups say. It can process enormous amounts of data that traditional analytics programs can't handle, including data scraped constantly off the borrower's phone. It can find patterns of creditworthiness or lack thereof on its own, without having to be told of every clue and correlation, startups like Branch.co And the cost savings of eliminating the need for loan officers lets these companies make the loans at a profit.

AI's role in Morgan, and numerous other creative endeavors, shows how far AI has come. Using techniques such as deep learning has enabled tremendous progress, but AI remains relegated to an assistant role--for now. "What's interesting is that, compared to a lot of other machine learning techniques, deep learning technology is what's called a'generative model,' meaning that it learns how to mimic the data it's been trained on," explains Jason Toy, CEO of Somatic, a start-up focused on developing deep learning applications. "If you feed it thousands of paintings and pictures, all of a sudden you have this mathematical system where you can tweak the parameters or the vectors and get brand new creative things similar to what it was trained on." But even highly touted AI techniques have their limitations.

After decades of experiencing a slow burn, artificial intelligence innovation has caught fire to become the hottest item on the agendas of the world's top technology firms. "Faced with a constant onslaught of data, we needed a new type of system that learns and adapts, and we now have that with AI," says Arvind Krishna, Senior Vice President of Hybrid Cloud and Director of IBM Research. "What was deemed impossible a few years ago is not only becoming possible, it's very quickly becoming necessary and expected." As a result, leading tech companies, as well as scores of startups and researchers, have been racing to develop AI solutions that can provide competitive advantage by augmenting human intelligence. Today's flurry of AI advances wouldn't have been possible without the confluence of three factors that combined to create the right equation for AI growth: the rise of big data combined with the emergence of powerful graphics processing units (GPUs) for complex computations and the re-emergence of a decades-old AI computation model--deep learning.

In the past few years, advances in artificial intelligence have captured the public imagination and led to widespread acceptance of AI-infused assistants. But this accelerating pace of innovation comes with increased uncertainty about where the technology is headed and how it will impact society. One of the clearest areas of agreement, however, is that advancing the ability of computers to interact with us in a more natural way is critical for the AI-human relationship to reach its fullest potential. We spoke to 30 of AI's most knowledgeable scientists and thought leaders about the future of the technology, and most agreed that advances in human-computer interaction (HCI) will be both dependent on AI--and essential to progressing its applications. The consensus is that within three to five years, advances in AI will make the conversational capabilities of computers vastly more sophisticated, paving the way for a sea change in computing.