Lawrence Wintermeyer, CEO of Innovate Finance, expects to see more innovators trying to tap into the unbanked and unrepresented consumer market. He said: "The firm Pockit, for example, gives customers an account and card that they can use to manage their money and make payments. Users can deposit money into their account at thousands of locations across the UK or have their salaries or benefits paid into their account. Pockit users also get cash back deals on the high street and online." So-called "challenger banks" are popping up and Monese is the latest to make waves.

Artificial intelligence is making waves once again as Google's AlphaGo made headlines after it defeated Go grandmaster Lee Se-Dol for the first time. While many are calling gains in AI a win for society, others are voicing concerns over the future of a society in which computers can outperform humans in almost every conceivable fashion. Whether it is self-driving cars or a simple game of chess, artificial intelligence is continually one-upping humanity. The latest Go grandmaster defeat is just the icing on the cake. Therefore, some are saying it is time that we start looking at practical application of AI technology while understanding that AI is "unpredictable" and "immoral."

I have worked for a couple of decades with professional services firms that perform financial audits, but I have never done one--nor have I ever wanted to do one, to be honest. I'm not good with work that involves structured processes, details, and rigorous checking, and audits always seemed heavily infused with those kinds of tasks. Now, however, I am becoming quite interested in audits for two reasons. First, they are beginning to employ substantial amounts of analytics. Secondly, there is increasing talk about employing cognitive technologies to help with audits.

This week my audience greatly appreciated the Motherboard post "Joke-Telling Robots Are the Final Frontier of Artificial Intelligence", so I decided to spend a few words on humor and artificial intelligence. Why allowing an artificial intelligence to joke is important? I like the honest way Bloomberg asks for the same question in a post which is now 4 years old, but is still a good read: Can a computer be taught to be funny? It doesn't seem nearly as important an endeavor as getting computers to identify malignant tumors or prevent airplanes from crashing, but being able to model humor is a key problem in attempting to model human thought. As Motherboard explains "Some specialists even see humor as the final frontier for artificial intelligence, because it requires mastery of sophisticated functions like self-awareness, empathy, spontaneity, and linguistic subtlety."

When we imagine a future where humans and robots coexist, it doesn't take long for us to arrive at a conclusion where the human race tragically ends. A robot uprising usually occurs, followed by the inevitable enslavement of all humankind. But when it comes to the future and what will actually unfold, Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus VR (which Facebook now owns) and inventor of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset, isn't sweating it. "The reason I'm not creeped out is pretty simple," said Luckey, who sat down with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and Re/code journalist Kara Swisher on Saturday at the Silicon Valley Comic Con in San Jose, California. "A lot of people look to science-fiction for representations of technology. It can also be flawed."

Radical advances in artificial intelligence, along with greater processing power, are pushing cognitive computing and deep learning into the mainstream. Since the dawn of computing, the goal of engineers, designers and developers has been to imbue machines with greater intelligence so they can think more like humans. Today, marked leaps in processing power and incredible advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are pushing the concept from the pages of science fiction novels to our homes and workplaces. "The growing complexity of computing and information--and the need for more intelligent automation--is leading to the next wave of transformation, including cognitive systems," says Paul Brody, technology sector strategy leader for the Americas at consulting firm EY. Systems such as IBM's Watson, as well as interfaces such as Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana and Google Voice, are transforming the way data and information are routed to people.

Artificial intelligence (AI) advocates within enterprise IT teams must focus their efforts on solving "real business problems" if they are to convince the board to support the technology. That was the key message from BGL Group's insight and technology manager, who was speaking at Computing's Big Data and Analytics Summit 2016 this morning. Mike Maddock began by spelling out the differences between the public's perception of AI, and what it can now realistically achieve for the enterprise. He described Gartner's recent prediction that, by 2020, five per cent of financial transactions across the world will be carried out by AI, as a "bold claim". He also cast doubt on the usefulness of hypothesis-driven AI, as epitomised IBM's Watson, which achieved fame after its victory in the US gameshow Jeopardy.

Get ready for a shakeup: Google is setting its sights on the healthcare industry. Google built its empire by establishing itself as a monolith of search. Now, it intends to build another by doing the opposite: fragmenting its efforts to secure a multitude of "smaller" victories, each of them worth billions. Leveraging its colossal reserves and analytic prowess, Google is becoming, in effect, the largest healthcare startup incubator in history -- so who are these leading analytic minds at the helm of this effort? They're actually not minds at all, but advanced computers that can make decisions based on technology called "machine learning."

The fear of Artificial Intelligence technology replacing the human workforce is old news. Chances are, you've never heard of rag-pickers, gandy dancers, or leech collectors- that's because modern technology has eliminated the need for them. More recently, jobs like elevator operators and lamplighters are almost completely phased out. One study at the University of Oxford estimated that 47% of total American jobs could be automated and replaced by computers by 2033. The question is, do these facts spell doom for the workforce?

Artificial intelligence experts in the '90s thought it would take at least another century for researchers to accomplish what Google did just two weeks ago. AI experts thought it could take until the year 2100, if not longer, for people to create an AI system that can beat a human at Go, according to a 1997 New York Times article posted on Reddit's futurology thread by user Yull-Ban. Google's AI system AlphaGo made history when it beat Go champion Lee Sedol four times in a five-game tournament earlier this month. The feat was seen as a major milestone in the AI community since IBM's Deep Blue computer beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov. That's because beating Go, a game with more than 300 times the number of plays as chess, requires sophisticated pattern recognition.