Elon Musk is apparently worried about humans becoming subservient to artificially intelligent computers. I think the notion is a bit absurd. I'd argue the sci-fi nightmare more likely to become reality thanks to AI has to do with big-brother states and corporate manipulation of consumers' lives. I'd also argue that the likelihood of any of these scenarios coming true -- mine or Musk's -- has everything to do with the laws governing our personal data. To recap, Musk made the following comment Saturday on Twitter, referring to a forthcoming book called Superintelligence.

Thanks to the proliferation of data, customers are more informed than ever before. There's been a seismic shift in the power dynamic between businesses and customers. Armed with empowerment, customers are demanding that customer experience be put on a pedestal. According to research by Walker, customer experience is slated to overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator by the end of 2020. With this shift in the cosmos, customer churn is top-of-mind for all businesses.

To scale the benefits of AI-innovations, companies need to stop thinking of AI tools and applications -- such as natural language processing or computer vision -- as standalone solutions. Otherwise, the opportunity cost could be as large as 41% of revenue by 2023. Companies that see AI as components of next-generation enterprise IT systems stand to grow revenues by as much as one-third over the next five years. And as systems evolve, so must the IT workforce. Companies will need multidisciplinary talent that can bridge infrastructure, development tools, programming languages, AI, and machine learning.

When it comes to new technologies like Artificial Intelligence, the pure technology is only a small aspect required to putting it to use. Still, given the hype that exists currently, one can easily loose sight of the big picture as announcements of new algorithms, toolboxes, or cloud services fight for grabbing our attention as the next game changer. The field itself can also feel quite overwhelming at times, as it is always expanding and keeping track of all the developments seems impossible for one individual to do. There was a time when a single individual could cover all the bits and pieces, but given the explosive expansion that this field has been going through these past years, I think it is becoming more and more challenging. So this is my attempt to draw a bigger picture of how different roles and levels fit together to "do AI" in an enterprise setting.

The big dream of Big Data was that it would empower people and organisations to find out just about anything they needed from the vast pools of data being collected all around them. That with the right data, there would be no great unanswerable questions holding you back, or leaving your future performance to chance. The problem, as we soon discovered, is that data on its own doesn't solve anything. Unless you know what to ask and how to frame your question, it won't help you at all. Even many so-called self-service Business Intelligence and data analysis platforms have failed to help ordinary business users access data in the way they want to get the answers they urgently need.

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. As an Artificial Intelligence researcher, I often come across the idea that many people are afraid of what AI might bring. It's perhaps unsurprising, given both history and the entertainment industry, that we might be afraid of a cybernetic takeover that forces us to live locked away, "Matrix"-like, as some sort of human battery. And yet it is hard for me to look up from the evolutionary computer models I use to develop AI, to think about how the innocent virtual creatures on my screen might become the monsters of the future. Might I become "the destroyer of worlds," as Oppenheimer lamented after spearheading the construction of the first nuclear bomb?

When we talk about artificial intelligence (AI), the conversation is often tainted by a sense of trepidation. The technology is undeniably powerful, and for decades humanity has been fascinated by its potential in both destructive and constructive visions of the future. Ultimately, the likelihood is that the reality will be comparatively muted, a world in which people become accustomed to machine assistance but are unlikely to be overwhelmed by an army of sentient robots fuelled by murderous indignation. Similarly, not all incarnations of AI will be co-opted by big business to help sell products; there will be genuinely positive applications. One of the tech industry's major issues is that it rarely caters for disabled users.

IBM and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. said Wednesday they would significantly expand their existing global e-Health alliance with a focus on two key healthcare areas: the discovery of new treatment options and improving chronic disease management. Both projects will run on the IBM Watson Health Cloud, the two companies said in a statement. The IBM Watson Health Cloud is a health-data enabled platform-as-a-service which is designed to help healthcare organizations derive individualized insights and obtain a more complete picture of the many factors that can affect people's health based on machine learning. The expanded partnership underlines the increased convergence of drugs discovery and treatments with cognitive computing, which aims to improve and better target medication for patients, increase effectiveness and lower costs. The companies said the expanded cooperation envisages a new, three-year research collaboration to develop new technologies that will enable a systematic approach to help repurpose drugs and aid in the discovery of new uses for existing drugs, the joint statement said.

IBM and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. said Wednesday they would significantly expand their existing global e-Health alliance with a focus on two key healthcare areas: the discovery of new treatment options and improving chronic disease management. Both projects will run on the IBM Watson Health Cloud, the two companies said in a statement. The IBM Watson Health Cloud is a health-data enabled platform-as-a-service which is designed to help healthcare organizations derive individualized insights and obtain a more complete picture of the many factors that can affect people's health based on machine learning. The expanded partnership underlines the increased convergence of drugs discovery and treatments with cognitive computing, which aims to improve and better target medication for patients, increase effectiveness and lower costs. The companies said the expanded cooperation envisages a new, three-year research collaboration to develop new technologies that will enable a systematic approach to help repurpose drugs and aid in the discovery of new uses for existing drugs, the joint statement said.