Thank you for subscribing to the monthly THINK Marketing newsletter. Surely, both are struggles, but at least the alarm clock is anticipated. The way we manage our customer experience isn't all that different. Whether launching a test environment, integrating a third-party app into your checkout process, or monitoring a known bug in your mobile application, some online struggle is anticipated. It's the unanticipated struggle, however, that really causes the pain.

New Delhi [India], Mar 10: Global leader in digitally-powered business process management and services Genpact has launched its Artificial Intelligence (AI) Reporting solution that harnesses the power of AI technologies to automate financial planning and analysis (FP&A) operations and drive more timely, insightful reporting. CFOs have fast, seamless access to both internal and external data sources like never before, driving more accurate forecasts for quicker, smarter business decisions. Based on multiple studies including a study done jointly by the Genpact Research Institute and HfS Research, CFOs across the board struggle with three challenges in providing actionable insights to their business leaders, including the ability to get relevant disparate data from internal and external sources; delay and the effort it takes for their teams to manage and do basic analysis on that data, reducing its relevance and leaving little scope for predictive analytics and business insight value adds; and lack of reporting mechanism that creates the user experience for business leaders to use that data to drive real time actions. Genpact's cloud-based AI Reporting solution uses advanced digital technologies to help enterprises reimagine the end-to-end financial reporting process. By integrating structured and unstructured data from internal and external sources, and automating reporting processes with predictive analytics, natural language processing and generation, and machine learning, the solution drives greater agility to adapt to new business requirements.

Many fear that artificial intelligence (AI) will one day replace huge swaths of the workforce. Last year The World Economic Forum predicted that AI and automation technologies will displace 5 million jobs by 2020, with healthcare, energy, and financial industries experiencing the greatest job losses. Some pundits predict that AI will also replace journalists. The theory is that as machines gain a more nuanced understanding of language, they will be able to produce the type of content that human journalists currently produce. The Washington Post, for example, uses an AI bot called Heliograph to produce news stories.

I'm completely obsessed with the idea of using artificial intelligence, search patterns and information architecture to improve the findability of content. It seems like we're on the cusp of doing amazing things with chatbots and data mining, which can augment manual information architecture work and result in a better user experience overall. Let's say you have a service that includes a search component. Right now your users might be running searches and using manual filters to sort through the results, as search users are wont to do. How do you know if they are finding what they need?

The next time you shop on fashion website Myntra, you might end up choosing a t-shirt designed completely by a software--the pattern, colour and texture-without any intervention from a human designer. The first set of these t-shirts went on sale four days ago. This counts as a significant leap for Artificial Intelligence in ecommerce. For customers, buying online might seem simple--click, pay and collect. Behind the scenes, from the warehouses to the websites, artificial intelligence plays a huge role in automating processes.

Google's DeepMind, a London-based artificial intelligence company the search-and-cloud giant acquired in 2014, has been closely associated with Google's quest to build general AI. Earlier this year, with little publicity, DeepMind unveiled what looks like a useful step in that direction. The DeepMind team released a paper describing a neural network approach that would allow automatic "transfer learning," meaning a neural network could reuse what it already "knows" on new problems. If history is any hint, this is one innovation Google will keep close to its chest. Neural networks are a common type of machine learning that mimic, perhaps distantly, how neurons interrelate in the brain to pass information around.

Global leader in digitally-powered business process management and services Genpact has launched its Artificial Intelligence (AI) Reporting solution that harnesses the power of AI technologies to automate financial planning and analysis (FP&A) operations and drive more timely, insightful reporting. CFOs have fast, seamless access to both internal and external data sources like never before, driving more accurate forecasts for quicker, smarter business decisions. Based on multiple studies including a study done jointly by the Genpact Research Institute and HfS Research, CFOs across the board struggle with three challenges in providing actionable insights to their business leaders, including the ability to get relevant disparate data from internal and external sources; delay and the effort it takes for their teams to manage and do basic analysis on that data, reducing its relevance and leaving little scope for predictive analytics and business insight value adds; and lack of reporting mechanism that creates the user experience for business leaders to use that data to drive real time actions. Genpact?s cloud-based AI Reporting solution uses advanced digital technologies to help enterprises reimagine the end-to-end financial reporting process. By integrating structured and unstructured data from internal and external sources, and automating reporting processes with predictive analytics, natural language processing and generation, and machine learning, the solution drives greater agility to adapt to new business requirements.

Every December, we take a look back at big ideas from the past twelve months that promise to gain momentum in the new year. With more than eleven thousand projects launched between our Design and Tech categories in 2016, we have a nice sample to draw from. More importantly, we have a community of forward-thinking backers who help creators figure out which versions of the future to pursue. Here are some of the emerging trends we expect to see more of in 2017. With the headphone jack inching closer to the endangered-features list this year thanks to Apple, a number of projects have made a compelling case for pushing beyond the limits of traditional stereo sound.

Everyone knows the frustration of talking to banking customer service on the phone. You call in with a straightforward question and get the dreaded interactive voice response (IVR) recording. Before you know it, you're listening to a robotic voice ask how it can direct your call and having to give short, over-enunciated responses trying to get the system to understand what you want. The fact is, IVR isn't great for anyone. It's not great for customers because it's confusing and frustrating to use.

Marie Kratz, Professor at ESSEC Business School and Director of ESSEC CREAR (Center of Research in Econo-finance and Actuarial sciences on Risk), shares her thoughts about how artificial intelligence will re-shape the actuarial profession. We've all experienced those minor, sometimes major, mishaps in life – your bike gets stolen, you have a car accident, you drop your computer or, worse still, you wake up one morning to find the living room swamped in 3 feet of muddy floodwater. And we have all witnessed the drama of natural catastrophe on the news. The camera covers the victims, some considering themselves lucky, others overcome by the emotion of losing their hard-earned belongings or loved ones – all of them in wait for the complications that will come, not least the financial ones. This is where the insurance company comes in.