Think AI is just coming for customer service jobs? Think again, say AI experts, who point to recent advances in large language models as evidence that white-collar and professional jobs will be disrupted too. Figuring out how AI and humans will coexist in the workplace is shaping up to be a key conversation for 2023 and beyond. "I think there are traditional white-collar businesses, white-collar professions that are going to be transformed by some of the innovation in large language models and AI technologies," said Peter Wang, the CEO of Anaconda, a provider of data science tools. "And that is going to create really interesting social and cultural dynamics that will basically settle out over the rest of this decade and reverberate into the 2030s."

While only about 1% of companies are making the most of their data today, real progress is being made in democratizing the use of AI, and the future of business automation via AI is quite bright, H2O.ai's CEO and founder Sri Ambati said before a pair of H2O World conferences this week. "There's still a long way to go from where we are. It's in the earliest phases of adoption," Ambati told Datanami in an interview earlier this month. "You can see that only 1%, or less than 1%, of the world's companies can truly leverage their data. So that means 99% needs further adoption, simplification, and cultural transformation to use data and AI. It's going to take the next 10 to 20 years."

From customer experience applications in banking to fraud detection in credit, financial organizations are leaning heavily on AI tools. One important aspect of AI in finance is making the technology explainable. Organizations must ensure that their models are unbiased and can be easily explained in light of increasing compliance and regulatory oversight of AI and machine learning technology. During the Ai4 2022 Finance Summit on March 1, H2O.ai CEO Sri Ambati spoke to attendees about explainable AI, AI governance and data governance. H2O.ai is an AI cloud vendor that develops an open source machine learning platform for enterprises.

Now, it has raised $100 million to fuel its growth, a round of funding that values H2O.ai at $1.7 billion post-money ($1.6 billion pre-money). This is a Series E round, and it's being led by a strategic backer, the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), which has been a customer of the startup and will be using the backing to kick off a deeper partnership between the two to build new services. Others in the round include Goldman Sachs, Pivot Investment Partners, Crane Venture Partners and Celesta Capital. Further plans for the funding include building more products for H2O.ai as a whole, and hiring more talent to continue expanding the company's H2O AI Hybrid Cloud platform. This is not the first time that a customer has led a round as a strategic backer: in 2019, Goldman Sachs led the company's Series D of $72.5 million.

AI and machine learning by themselves do not move the needle. The technologies must be applied somehow to have the desired impact. With that in mind, H2O.ai today unveiled an open-source Python development framework called H2O Wave for creating new user interfaces (UIs) for AI applications and connecting the dots between data science insight and real world impact. Data scientists have an abundance of tools and technology for exploring data and building machine learning models, including things like PyTorch, TensorFlow, and the popular H2O library (not to mention the company's Driverless AI offering). But when it comes to building compelling user interfaces that bring those ML models to life, there aren't as many options available, according to H2O.ai founder and CEO SriSatish Ambati.

Now here's a crazy idea: What if the data we all generate on a day to day basis benefited us, instead of the companies that collect it? It may sound nuts at first, but some AI experts see a future in which people hold full control over their data and smart digital assistants infused with AI work to protect and monetize a person's individual's data for his or her benefit. This vision of a more equitable big data world is one that's held by Sri Ambati. The H2O.ai founder and CEO sees a day not too far in the future in which people are empowered to control their own data as an asset, and even to profit directly from their data, which is something that only a handful of individuals are currently able to do. "Today, whether we want it or not, our data is stored on giant social networks," Ambati tells Datanami.

Should restrictions be placed on the use of artificial intelligence? Google CEO Sundhar Pichai certainly does, and so do a host of other business leaders, including the CEOs of IBM and H2O.ai, as the chorus of calls for putting limits on the spread of the rapidly evolving technology gets louder. Pichai aired his opinion on the matter in an opinion piece published Monday in the Financial Times, titled "Why Google thinks we need to regulate AI" (story is protected by a paywall). In the story, Pichai, who is also CEO of Google's parent company, Alphabet, shared his lifelong love of technology, as well as the breakthroughs that his company is making in using AI to fight breast cancer, improve weather forecasts, and reduce flight delays. As virtuous as these AI-powered accomplishments are, they don't account for the negative impacts that AI also can have, Pichai wrote.

Water can flow, or it can crash. It becomes the form of whatever container you put it in. This famous idea from actor and philosopher Bruce Lee is a part of the mission behind H2O.ai (H2O). At H2O World New York on October 22nd, H2O.ai celebrated its vision to make every company an AI company with its growing community of makers and builders. H2O.ai has developed enterprise AI and machine learning platforms to give companies the ability to easily access and leverage data throughout their organizations.

On Tuesday, the company said it raised $72.5 million in a round led by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Ping An Global Voyager Fund, with continued investments from Wells Fargo & Co., Nvidia Corp. and Nexus Venture Partners. H2O.ai, based in Mountain View, Calif., has raised a total of $147 million since it was founded in 2012. The company sells software that helps businesses incorporate machine learning into their applications to make them more predictive. Its machine-learning platform is used by more than 18,000 companies, including Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc., which uses it to price retail goods, and Capital One Financial Corp., which uses it to help detect fraud, Mr. Ambati said. The platform offers a set of tools that are designed to simplify AI for nonexperts, and can be used for a range of applications.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Goldman Sachs Group Inc, China's Ping An Global Voyager Fund and others have invested $72.5 million in H20.ai, a rapidly growing artificial intelligence startup, the companies said on Tuesday. Founded in 2012, California-based H20.ai is a software company that aims to make it easier for companies that lack the skilled workforce or time to adapt to the rapidly changing artificial intelligence landscape, Chief Executive and founder Sri Ambati said in an interview. Customers like Capital One Financial Corp, Wells Fargo & Co, Aetna and Booking.com can use H20's platform to automate model building, feature engineering and to pull valuable insights out of large amounts of the companies' proprietary data, Ambati said. H20 gives customers "recipes" to use that automate the entire process of building, training and deploying models, or it will help a company's own employees to create their tailored models. "Our mission is to make our customers AI companies ... and (to reduce) the barrier for new data scientists to produce great models," Ambati said.