If you grew up loving the Transformers franchise, you may have dreamed of the day technology would bring your favourite robots to life. Now, a Japanese engineering company has turned that childhood fantasy into a reality, with its 3.5-ton robot that transforms into a car within moments. The Archax, designed by Tsubame Industries, is a 15ft-tall piloted mech able to go from a standing'robot mode' into a streamlined'vehicle mode' with the press of a button. Incredible footage shows a pilot climbing in through the cockpit hatch and manipulating the robot's arms and hands before switching modes and driving off. Tsubame Industries has currently made five of the giant robots and plans to sell them for $3 million (£2.46m) each.

Vistara is among India's top airlines, with an operating landscape of more than 40 destinations (both domestic and international) using a fleet of 54 aircraft. The airline has flown over 35 million customers since its inception, of which 5 million were flown between March to July 2022. According to Vinod Bhat, CIO, Vistara, the organisation's key priorities have always revolved around a seamless customer experience, and how the company can work towards elevating it to the next level. "To ensure that, we have strived to maintain the right balance of value for our customers and cost efficiency. Another important aspect is making sure that our infrastructure is resilient. We have been rapidly investing in IT infrastructure and new digital technologies that are easily adaptable and scalable to further enhance customer experience," he says.

'Gutfeld' guests discuss reports a Google software engineer was suspended for saying artificial intelligence is sentient. Google is a divisive company. Maybe you love the ease of Gmail and how easy it is to find anything you want online. Or maybe you get a shiver up your spine thinking of all the data the search giant has on you. You might see a few personal details when you search for yourself online.

LiDAR sensors are usually the spinning cylinders that emit laser rays and analyze the reflections to map the environment for an autonomous vehicle. They are unwieldy mechanical devices that cost thousands of dollars, so we’re not seeing them on commercially available vehicles. Things might change after a new high-resolution LiDAR chip was developed at the University of California in Berkeley.

If sales were simple, then every seller and every sales organization would be successful. We're seeing a fundamental shift in the way customers want to engage--instead of relying only on direct contact with sellers, customers more frequently use digital channels to get answers to questions and even to make purchasing decisions. The seller is moving from guiding every step of the sales process to being a trusted advisor. To fill this role, sellers must regroup and look for other ways to make a difference to their customers. One way is through understanding the complete 360-degree view of the customer.

Corporations today must operate on sound intelligence that comes from every corner and crevice of their business. Information is everywhere, and the ability to extract existing data that cover all details of your operations can give you powerful insights into your people, departments, business units, and even competitors. Taking the proper steps to manage your knowledge equips you with a 360-degree view of your company, giving you a competitive edge and a clear path towards your business goals. Effective knowledge management starts with effective knowledge gathering. This begins with utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) to extract data from unstructured sources to automatically be placed in a single database and converting this data to structured information.

Acquiring competitor intelligence is one facet that nearly all businesses have in common. Ideally, to stay ahead of your competition, it is essential that you apply modern techniques to monitor what the competitors are doing. By using technology to monitor the activities of your competitors, you will be able to retain your customers and attract many more. This is where the insightful role of AI in competitor intelligence comes into the picture. Over the years, there have been a lot of technologies that promised to support businesses the way AI does, but none of them can be compared to the practicality of AI.

Every day, businesses and organizations are tasked with making more decisions than any human could ever hope to handle. Often, enterprises need to make complex business decisions with limited information on hand. With the help of AI-based products and AI-driven enterprise search solutions as a critical enabling technology, leaders can make better strategic and informed decisions by gaining insight from a vast amount of data in a short period. With the assistance of custom dashboards and 360-degree views of data, employees with different roles can each have a single view into all the information they need at its most appropriate level. The key message for companies is that making the right decisions and fast decisions are not either-or anymore.

So here's my list of developments that I think will be relevant in the next few years, in quite random order, and admittedly not entirely without overlap. If there is one theme that has and continues to permeate through the Covid pandemic, it is that of digitalization. The pandemic has painfully brought to light the failure to make necessary investments in consistent processes and technologies in the past. As a result, many companies continue to have processes that are characterized by media disruptions. The need to improve here is also the overarching theme for some of the other developments and trends currently evident. Companies and their employees, as well as customers, have had to learn to deal with a highly distributed work infrastructure.

Truly understanding your customer is the holy grail of those at the frontiers of personalisation. Unparalleled amounts of customer data enable machines to hold up a mirror to our preferences, understand our needs and sell us something relevant. Mass customisation can now reach new heights at a time when choice is infinite, especially online. "Personalisation 2.0 or, as some call it, hyper-personalisation, creates an ideal paradigm where we're now able to move away from just selling people something, to being able to anticipate a very discrete need, and make a highly relevant and curated offer at an exact time," explains Utpal Kaul, head of new product incubation at CWT. Over the last few years, huge advances in artificial intelligence (AI), machine and deep-learning, as well as algorithm neural networks, have made this possible.