Along with building the Bixby voice assistant, Samsung also plans to invest in AI startups. The company on Wednesday said its Silicon Valley-based Samsung NEXT business has launched a new fund to invest in early-stage startups "solving AI problems, as well as those using AI to solve computer science problems." The Q Fund doesn't have a cap, but it falls under Samsung NEXT's overall $150 million investment fund. The new AI fund will invest only in seed and series A investments, the earliest stages of a startup's operations. Such investments typically are up to $1 million, though the Samsung NEXT fund managers can invest more, as well.

Digital transformation's prevalence in everything we read is a signifier that the way we live and work is going to continue to evolve over the next decade. In this blog, I want to highlight a few use cases showing how disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning will be used in the office of the CFO to increase productivity, simplify processes, and support decision-making. Analytics: Since I have a background in financial planning and analysis (FP&A), I have been thinking about how digital assistants could impact analytics. Today, almost everybody in FP&A receives countless calls asking for information like, "What was our revenue in Q3 last year for this product? What has our growth been over the last three years for this line of business?"

Welcome to the club if you are still behind the artificial intelligence curve. This is the last chapter of my AI series, and I hope it has shed a humble light upon the linchpin of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). Included below are links to previous installments. You do not want to miss the mini-documentary in part 3. Keep the following quotes in mind as I prognosticate today on AI jobs for the near-term. "I have all the tools and gadgets. I tell my son, who is a producer. You never work for the machine; the machine works for you."

Artificial intelligence is changing the world of retirement planning. By using improved datasets and algorithms to efficiently deliver solutions tailored to people's needs, AI can help them save, invest and retire better. One of the hottest trends to emerge in this area in recent years is the use of robo-advisors. These are software programs that use the data supplied by clients to create and automatically manage their investment portfolios. They're gaining in popularity, but are they better than human advisors?

Gurugram-based HRtech startup Leena AI has become a part of summer class 2018 of US-based investor Y Combinator and has confirmed an investment from the company. Talking to Inc42, Adit Jain, co-founder told that while building bots, the team learned through its experience with ChatterOn that it's better to concentrate on a single subject because the underlying machine learning model gets better the more it's used. Following this understanding, the team launched Leena AI in August 2017 as a provider of virtual assistants for the workplace to focus on human resources chatbot. As an enterprise virtual agent, currently focusing on HR, Leena AI draws all functionality from ChatterOn, which increases the speed of execution by multi-fold. "To deliver value, you can't do many things and must focus on a few. We felt that the biggest pain in the internal shared services space was in HR because of highly fragmented back-end application landscape and decided to go deeper in the HR vertical," Anit explained.

The robotics industry is estimated to hit $135.4 billion in 2019 as per IDC. There was a time when a robotics revolution was considered mere science-fiction. The rise of robotics has been phenomenal in most disciplines. From building robotic arms for medical procedures to running autonomous self-driving vehicles, robotics is empowering all technological sectors. In October 2017, Sophia, a social human-like robot was offered citizenship of Saudi Arabia – the first robot to achieve this status.

Inc. Echo Spot, from left, Echo, Echo Plus, and Fire TV devices sit on display during the company's product reveal launch event in downtown Seattle, Washington, U.S., on Wednesday, Sept. 27, 2017. Amazon unveiled a smaller, cheaper version of its popular Alexa-powered Echo speaker that the e-commerce giant said has better sound. Lennar, the nation's largest homebuilder, is now building model homes with Alexa-integrated technologies such as smart doorbells, locks, thermostats, lights and integrated Wifi. Amazon and Lennar announced the partnership in May to launch "Amazon Experience Centers" around the country. In these smart homes, customers would be able to ask Alexa to do anything from turning down the lights and starting a party music playlist to turning on the doorbell video feed when someone rings.

Editor's note: This post is the result of a collaboration with PredictX, a decision automation platform. Author Joni Lindes is a content writer at PredictX. AI is set to disrupt our current society on a major scale. According to Indeed, the number of roles in AI has risen by 485% in the UK since 2014, but the digital skills gap continues to hold back innovation. In 2017, companies spent around $22 billion on AI-related mergers and acquisitions -- 26 times more than 2015.

Say hello to CIMON, the world's first interactive A.I. system to be launched into space to assist the crew aboard the International Space Station. This robot is very smart, sort of like if Amazon's Alexa had gotten a Ph.D. in rocket science, but it can also tell jokes. Short for Crew Interactive Mobile Companion, this robot was brought into existence by melding Airbus' hardware with the software behind IBM's Watson supercomputer. "[CIMON is] the smartest lab partner in the world," Bret Greenstein -- IBM's Global Vice President of Watson Internet of Things Offerings -- tells Inverse. "[It] lets you take all the credit, is there for you when you need them."

I was recently invited to speak at the TiECON Florida conference in Tampa Bay. I came back amazed and fascinated by the entrepreneurial activity and enthusiasm of the community in Southern Florida. Unbeknownst to me, University of South Florida (USF) is amongst the nation's Top 30 for research expenditures among public universities, according to the National Science Foundation. It has a vast amount of intellectual capital, ranking 19th out of 200 U.S. universities in research commercialization with 125 patents granted for 2017. It is also the home of USF Connect, a technology incubator that unite technology and talent with businesses.