Thought Leader Christoph Auer-Welsbach

For Christoph Auer-Welsbach, partner, IBM Ventures, interaction between humans and machines is nothing new: "Think of chess -- here people have been playing against computers for years." He sees artificial intelligence (AI) not as a danger, but as a valuable way of rounding out human abilities. "Computers will not be superior to us," Auer-Welsbach says. In many professions, however, AI can make people's everyday work easier. Take jobs in the healthcare sector, for instance: "To stay up to date on the state of all patients or all medical developments at all times, a doctor would have to spend 160 hours a week reading. And doctors just don't have that kind of time."