The insurance sector has entered a phase of profound transformation. Numerous Insurtech startups--around 1,000 according to Venture Scanner map--have popped up to challenge the traditional model by generating more than 16 billion dollars in the last years from insurance companies. I believe that we will see a completely changed insurance sector in the medium term. But I consider it a joke for an industry conference to show a picture of a newborn and sell it as the last intermediary or the last client to have purchased an insurance policy. I'm convinced that insurance companies will still be relevant in the future, or will become even more relevant than they are now, but these companies will have to be insurtechs, or players who use technology as the main enablers for reaching their own strategic objectives.

Tax season has arrived, as the Super Bowl recently reminded us: In the first half alone, two commercials encouraged viewers to trust computers to do our taxes, the first from H&R Block with its new partner Watson, and the second from TurboTax with its friendly talking tax bot. Vasant Dhar (@ProfDhar) is a professor at the Stern School of Business and the Center for Data Science at NYU. He is chief editor of the Big Data journal. Machines won't be able to automatically file taxes with the IRS for a few years. But do these commercials signal that robots can come close, requiring fewer human experts, mostly for sanity checks?

King's College Hospital has created a free virtual reality app designed to ease patients' fears ahead of MRI machine scans. My MRI at King's, which has primarily been built for children, is essentially a simple audiovisual guide that walks patients through the events that will happen on the day. It can be used at home ahead of a scan, and is viewable on a virtual reality headset, such as Google Cardboard. However, users can also explore it on a phone or tablet. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

It is about to become much harder to find streams of football matches and downloads of music, under new rules. Search giant Google and Bing will hide illegally pirated content and instead show them links to places to get that same video or music legally, by paying. That is after the two companies launched a crackdown on piracy websites and signed up to a new code that is intended to protect users safety by stopping them from visiting disreputable sites. Keeping people from visiting illegal sites will keep them safe from the kind of spam, advertising and malware that is often served alongside the streams or downloads, according to those backing the code. The giant human-like robot bears a striking resemblance to the military robots starring in the movie'Avatar' and is claimed as a world first by its creators from a South Korean robotic company Waseda University's saxophonist robot WAS-5, developed by professor Atsuo Takanishi and Kaptain Rock playing one string light saber guitar perform jam session A man looks at an exhibit entitled'Mimus' a giant industrial robot which has been reprogrammed to interact with humans during a photocall at the new Design Museum in South Kensington, London Electrification Guru Dr. Wolfgang Ziebart talks about the electric Jaguar I-PACE concept SUV before it was unveiled before the Los Angeles Auto Show in Los Angeles, California, U.S The Jaguar I-PACE Concept car is the start of a new era for Jaguar.

In case you missed it, there;s a post on Medium by Steven Levy that explains everything you might want to know about how machine learning works at Apple.

Systems like these rely on a technology infrastructure that can import, analyse and interpret huge volumes of data and take appropriate action without the need for human intervention. While this is already a reality for the types of recommendations referenced above, the next step for AI or machine learning technologies is to form an established part of customer service and broader business operations, says Neil Sholay, Head of Oracle Digital, EMEA.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will be eating the world. Don't take my word for it -- in the roundup of venture capital predictions for 2017, I found it to be the top recurring theme. Since AI and ML startups cut across verticals (analytics, fintech, health, adtech, security, etc), it's easier to group them under the "machine intelligence" umbrella, coined by Shivon Zillis, a partner at Bloomberg Beta. In 2016 alone, 300 "machine intelligence" (AI ML) startups in Europe raised over €1.4 Billion in VC funding. While the terms AI and ML get thrown around readily, the companies that truly apply Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Computer Vision and Deep Learning have the potential to address problems that were unsolvable before.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke at a public event in India on Monday, stressing upon the immense potential of artificial intelligence (AI), calling it the "ultimate breakthrough" in technology. SEE ALSO: Here's why those tech billionaires are throwing millions at ethical AI "Because for all the advances in computer interface, there is nothing to beat language [the ability to do human-level speech recognition]," he said during a fireside chat with Nandan Nilekani -- India's premier technocrat and the brain behind the Aadhaar identification system. The chat was streamed live on the Microsoft Developer page on Facebook. Nadella and Nilekani were later joined by Binny Bansal, CEO of Flipkart, India's largest e-commerce company that announced a cloud partnership with Microsoft's Azure. Calling AI "the third run time", Nadella said, "If the operating system was the first run time, the second run time you could say was the browser, and the third run time can actually be the agent. Because in some sense, the agent knows you, your work context, and knows the work. And that's how we are building Cortana. We are giving it a really natural language understanding."

"Whether you know it or not, as an executive in a company, your company is doing machine learning and artificial intelligence," says Stephen Pratt. "It's just in hidden pockets within your company." Pratt is the founder and CEO of Noodle.ai, In this talk clip from Strata Hadoop World 2016 in New York, he describes a framework for determining where your company stands on its technological leadership, how your company's technology can contribute to shareholder value, and the importance of developing a meaningful plan for implementing artificial intelligence in the enterprise. For high-level data strategy, join the Strata Business Summit, March 14-16, 2017.

As companies talk seriously about the workplace role of adaptive intelligence, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and natural language understanding, it's time to talk about the fundamental shift in user experience (UX) these emerging technologies could also bring about. The goal is to deliver more personalized and contextual user experiences based on where users are and what they're doing. Any form of intelligence, whether machine learning or AI, is there to anticipate your needs. This extends beyond computers--a butler, for example, is there to do what you ask and anticipate your needs. From a UX perspective, we can look at any transaction.