Illustration: Chaitanya Dinesh Surpur Artificial intelligence (AI) is fast becoming a topic that is relevant to everyone today and, therefore, a subject that everyone ought to learn at least the rudiments of, say experts. From the humble milkman delivering packets of milk to households in the morning to the highest lawmakers and biggest industrialists, AI will increasingly touch everyone. "A lot of people look at AI as a vertical that calls for experts to develop," says Amit Anand, founding partner at Jungle Ventures, a VC firm in Singapore that has invested in several tech startups in India. However, both in his own mind and as an advisor to the Singapore government on the ethical use of AI, "We have taken a view that AI is going to affect everybody, and hence everyone should be knowledgeable and have a certain level of understanding of AI." Click here to see Forbes India's comprehensive coverage on the Covid-19 situation and its impact on life, business and the economy You can buy our tablet version from Magzter.com. To visit our Archives, click here.)

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is already leading some forecasters to predict a startling vision of construction in a generation's time – where roles traditionally carried out by human beings are instead performed by robots. In the first of our special features Denise Chevin examines which areas of the industry will be most affected. The rise of AI is the great story of our time. Those who have delved online to ask "Will a robot take my job?" might take comfort that design and construction professions such as architects, quantity surveyors or construction managers are low down on the list of professions likely to be replaced by machines, compiled by scientists from the Martin School at Oxford University in 2015. But that belies the profound impact experts say artificial intelligence and machine learning will have on the roles that both trades and professionals do in the built environment.

The CIOB Digital Special Interest Group took part in a'mind hive' on artificial intelligence (AI) – here's what they said. Momentum is definitely building behind AI in construction and ultimately it will have a profound impact on the sector. That is the overriding view of the Chartered Institute of Building's Digital Technologies & Asset Management Special Interest Group. Aecom global BIM/MIC consultancy director David Philp (above), who chairs the group, said: "Although there is a lot of misdefinition and hype around AI we believe it will ultimately have a profound effect on built environment landscape and AI will allow us to take real meaning from our data. "Combined with distributed ledger technology like Blockchain, it could also help solve adversarial issues which we believe will enable new forms of outcome based transactional contracts.