Five years ago, accounting professional Ryan Tietjens found himself in conversation with a handful of strangers who were also going through the motions in their respective corporate jobs. Tietjens and his new-found business partners realised they shared a common desire -- they wanted to build a business out of a new cloud platform that they knew would disrupt the accounting world. That business became Interactive Accounting, an Australia-based company that helps startups transition into scalable and connected beasts. Back when artificial intelligence (AI) was still thought of as a gimmick straight out of Hollywood, accounting was somewhat monotonous and unnecessarily time consuming, Tietjens said. "Accounting was really taking data from one source and putting it into a software platform, completing your financial accounts, exporting the data out, putting it in to another platform, and then moving on to the next job."

An independent report by a group of scientists commissioned by the US Defense Department argues that the increasingly impressive developments in the field of artificial intelligence are in no way a threat to humanity, as some prominent figures have recently suggested. The report's authors say that concern about the development of artificial intelligence comes from excessive media attention by journalists and science fiction writers about the progress of so-called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), or Strong Artificial Intelligence, relating to attempts to create intelligence in machines that can successfully perform any intellectual task carried out by humans. This generalist approach to artificial intelligence, while obviously provocative and highly (if not excessively) visible, is presently restricted, limited in its progress, and the results of which are far from disturbing. The fears it generates in some quarters do not correspond to the facts: at present, the attention devoted to the development of machines capable of making long-term decisions or thinking and acting like human beings is scarce. On the other hand, the development of artificial intelligence, whether relevant to the DoD or in other areas, focuses more on enhancing the abilities of humans and freeing us from certain tasks, rather that substituting us as such.

One in three NHS trusts are using AI for patient services. Business and government are on a mission to deploy and succeed with AI in healthcare – IBM Watson has been drafted in the fight against cancer, while the NHS is trialling an AI app and working with the likes of Google's Deepmind to improve patient care. It is easy to see why the UK's NHS would be rushing to adopt AI, with the over-burdened, costly and complex infrastructure of the NHS a perfect candidate in which to reap the efficiency and productivity benefits of AI. Although archaic processes still reign supreme in the NHS, new data does suggest that AI is starting to infiltrate and make an impact in trusts around the UK. According to a Freedom of Information request filed by Nuance, one in three NHS trusts are using AI for patient services.

NEW YORK – Artificial intelligence has made history by beating humans in poker for the first time, the last remaining game in which humans had managed to maintain the upper hand. Libratus, an AI built by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), racked up over $1.7 million worth of chips against four of the top professional poker players in the world during a 20-day marathon poker tournament that ended Tuesday in Philadelphia. While machines have beaten humans over the last two decade in chess, checkers, and most recently in the ancient game of go, Libratus' victory is significant because poker is a game of imperfect information -- similar to the real world, where not all problems are laid out and the difficulty in figuring out human behavior is one of the main reasons why it was considered immune to machines. "The best AI's ability to do strategic reasoning with imperfect information has now surpassed that of the best humans," said Tuomas Sandholm, professor of computer science at CMU who created Libratus with a Ph.D. student Noam Brown, said on Wednesday. The victory prompted inquiries from companies all over the world seeking to use Libratus' algorithm for problem solving.

In its last financial quarter, it sold $32bn (£25.6bn) That "other" category encompasses everything from crucifixes to sex toys, board games to plyboard, and mousemats printed with the faces of obscure TV and Radio personalities. It has also diversified beyond its simple shopping business: the company will sell you something to be delivered in less than one hour, food from restaurants, and even digital content to be watched on your TV or listened to on your phone. And, of course, it has a hardware business which many other companies would kill for, producing ebook readers and tablets, and single-handedly creating the product category of "smart speaker" with the Echo. But there's another chunk of Amazon that you're less likely to know about.

It's been a while since we last wrote about the latest changes in our command line tool, BigMLer. In the meantime, two unsupervised learning approaches have been added to the BigML toolset: Clusters and Anomaly Detectors. Clusters are useful to group together instances that are similar to each other and dissimilar to those in other groups, according to their features. Anomaly Detectors, on the contrary, try to reveal which instances are dissimilar from the global pattern. Clusters and anomaly detectors can be used in market segmentation or fraud detection respectively.

Anyone can look into a crystal ball, but it takes a visionary to translate vague details into useful information. Noted analyst, R "Ray" Wang is just such a visionary. As the founder and chairman of Silicon Valley-based Constellation Research, Wang advises companies on topics including how disruptive technologies impact the future of work, next generation customer experience, cross-channel commerce, big data and analytics, digital marketing transformation, and technology optimization. His latest book, Disrupting Digital Business, is required reading in many boardrooms. We spoke with Ray during the Oracle Cloud Days event in Denver to get his perspective on the role of cloud-based analytics in managing disruption and maximizing business opportunities.

Digital technologies and advanced analytics have the potential to create the invisible bank of the future. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and activated by voice, virtual banking assistants can become an integral part of consumers' daily lives. Banking today is becoming less and less a place you go, and more something that is hidden from view behind digital banking and commerce apps. Once an account is opened at a bank or credit union, there is less need to stop into a branch, since functions like deposits, borrowing, payments and transfers can be done without personal interaction through online and mobile devices. According to a new report published by KPMG, "Meet Eva – Your Enlightened Virtual Assistant and the Future Face of the Invisible Bank", technologies like Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa or Samsung's Viv will enable an even greater shift in banks and banking by 2030.

Artificial Lawyer recently caught up with Michael Kholodenko, co-founder of Seattle, US-based start-up, Binadox, which makes use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to provide a compliance tool for software licences that can prevent costly legal violations. At first you may think this does not sound that world-changing, but sometimes it is the very precise uses of AI technology that end up creating a very successful and useful product for lawyers and legal departments. This would appear to be doubly so, as Bindox points out, because getting your software licences in a mess, or just allowing staff to click'Yes – Accept Terms' can open a Pandora's box of legal problems. Bindadox seeks to meet this problem head on in an automated way. Fundamentally the software seeks to answer two questions: what happens when an employee downloads new software or subscribes to a cloud service (SaaS) and clicks on the little'Yes' box that agrees to the licence terms, with all the legal issues that suddenly connects to?