As Vice President of Channel Cloud, I oversee our partner channel, services and new vendor services from Microsoft, AWS, Workplace and BOX. We keep hearing it more and more: Every company should have an AI strategy. Artificial intelligence is the most sophisticated, groundbreaking and transformational technology trend in our times, but I'd like to talk about a different kind of AI. Artificial intelligence without active imagination is useless. Artificial intelligence is a tool much like a hammer.

Volvo's newly redesigned midsize SUV, the XC60, features all the safety-minded fancy features you'd expect from an automaker trying to eliminate deaths and serious injuries in its vehicles by 2020. Its rollover mitigation system tightens the seat belts to put you in the safest position in the event things go sideways and topsy-turvy. If you risk a head-on collision by wandering out of your lane, it will actively steer you back. It helps you weave around pedestrians, animals, and vehicles that might materialize ahead of you by steering more aggressively and precisely than you might on your own. Those last two capabilities are both new, and they open a curious question about the potential and limits of driver assistance: Before the robots take over, can these new systems make humans better drivers?

"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable" John Kenneth Galbraith Predictive modeling and traditional ratemaking is an exercise of forecasting the future, whether directly or indirectly (indirectly as generalizing historical lessons to the future). But is such forecasting so hopeless as being same as seeing into a crystal ball? The advantage of data scientist and actuaries is their close in contact with other business professionals. That means leverage to obtain, generate and apply a lot of expert judgment to try to overcome the shortcomings of quantitative modeling. Perhaps that is why such methods have been so successful over time. 'Data scientist' and'actuary' will be used synonymously here.