What's shiny and new one day can quickly become a relic of the past when the next innovation or iteration comes along. Unfortunately, enterprises don't have the luxury of simply plugging and unplugging technology into their digital ecosystem the way we as consumers unplugged our Sony Walkmans in favor of iPods and iPhones. This is especially true as we look to artificial intelligence (AI). AI has the potential to produce game-changing business outcomes based on data stored in legacy systems--if enterprises can figure out how to make it work. When AI works in an enterprise, it goes beyond generating insights that sit in isolation to actually automating actions based on those insights.

Many educational institutions maintain their own data centers. But to Jeff Olson, chief data officer and senior VP of technology strategy at the College Board, all those humming racks of servers are just plumbing--and he doesn't want to be in the plumbing business. He would rather focus on how the College Board, which administers the PSAT, SAT, and Advanced Placement Tests, can help students reach their educational goals. "We need to minimize the amount of work we do to keep systems up and running, and spend more energy innovating on things that matter to people," he says. That's why the College Board has pulled the plug on much of its IT plumbing in favor of the advanced capabilities offered by the cloud.

Once considered purely science fiction, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now a hot topic in the ERP space. We mentioned it in our "What is ERP," blog post and our Sage Summit recap post. But we're only now starting to realize the impact these technologies will have on our businesses, our jobs and of course, our enterprise software. Artificial intelligence is the science of incorporating human intelligence into machines. AI is a sub-field of computer science which aims to enable the development of machines/computers that are able complete tasks normally done by humans, specifically those tasks that normally require human intelligence.

Runway Girl Network recently sat down with Emirates SVP IT Strategic Services Neetan Chopra to discuss the evolution of the company's technology portfolio and the various data mining solutions being explored by an airline that moves nearly 52 million passengers annually. In the second part of our two-part series, Chopra speaks about the evolution of Passenger Service Systems (PSS) to meet the needs of modern data exchange, and the airline's block-chain and IoT work. Back-office systems covering everything from loyalty to maintenance will be impacted by these evolving platforms and Emirates is putting them into play in a major way, as well as mulling new approaches like creating an AI platform to aggregate artificial intelligence data. One of the things you talked about in your presentation is how technology stacks are evolving, especially for end users. Unfortunately, we're still on the legacy global distribution system (GDS) platforms for the most part, but how consumers interact is changing.

A day spent at the inaugural AI Summit in London last week highlighted the inherent contradiction when it comes to artificial intelligence and the enterprise: AI has been on the industry's radar for decades, yet businesses aren't ready to deploy the technology just yet. Murray Shanahan, professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London said that artificial intelligence (AI) is the latest fashion in an industry that is known for them: "Larry Ellison famously said that there is nothing more fashion led than the IT industry. We can see AI as a new fashion, rebadging a load of old ideas, but essentially technology has always been about adding value to an organisation." David Schatsky, head of the trend-sensing program for the US innovation team at Deloitte is a little more positive, saying: "I have looked at literally hundreds of examples of organisations in every industry that have applied or are piloting cognitive technologies in some way. We've found that you can classify everything into one of these three buckets of applications: product, process and insight."