Chris Boos has a mission: empowering human potential, freeing up time for creativity and innovative thinking through artificial intelligence (AI). Since then, Chris has led Arago to become a key partner and driver for the established economy, positioning Arago's AI HIRO as a platform for companies to reinvent their business models in the digital age. As CEO of Arago, Chris Boos vision is to transform traditional companies into future-proof, AI-enabled enterprises – regardless of their respective industry. Arago's international client base includes IT service providers, banks and companies in the telecommunications, steel and metals indusries. But his ambitions go far beyond: a strong believer in integrating machine reasoning and machine learning, Chris is constantly challenging current thinking on AI.

IT solutions provider NIIT Technologies Ltd and AI firm Arago have decided to deepen their partnership to optimise the IT operations of Global In-House Centres (GICs) using artificial intelligence. "As global MNCs in India drive innovation through their GICs, there is a need for them to build deeper partnerships with IT service providers to innovate with intelligent automation," said Arvind Mehrotra, president, Infrastructure Management Services. Umamaheshwar Mudigonda, vice-president, Service Provider Business, of Arago, said that the company had high hopes. "We aim to enable the GICs use cutting-edge AI technologies and implement practical solutions, said a press release.

The lack of an appropriate moniker for Arago's approach is a reflection that it is on the cusp of innovation of Intelligent Automation. By emphasizing that it progressing toward notions of general AI, Arago is aiming to put daylight between other approaches to AI, not least lower level machine learning. The integration of semantic mapping of events with expansive data sets puts Arago at the heart of organization's journey toward the OneOffice. This needs to be seen as a strategic rather than tactical investment into building Intelligent Automation capabilities. To realize the benefits from this approach, organizations have to shift toward a data-centric mindset.

Recently I met with Rene Buest, director of Technology Research at Arago, during Cloud Expo in Frankfurt. Based on his experience, I wanted to find out if artificial intelligence (AI) is eating the data infrastructure. In the last few months, I've read a few articles about the impact of AI on the software world, with provocative titles like AI Is Eating Software. As an employee of an infrastructure and data management company, I wanted to understand what AI means for data infrastructure and what kind of impact this exciting technology will have on the future of IT. I asked Rene four questions to get his take on the subject.

Warnings about artificial intelligence launching World War III--including a few flares sent up by Elon Musk--are an unfair scourge on an AI sector that sees itself making life easier and helping traditional companies survive. That's the view of Chris Boos, chief executive officer of Germany-based software firm Arago, who told MarketWatch in an interview that anything produced by a process can, should and will be run by AI, allowing human beings to be the creative thinkers and doers they were designed to be. Arago advises mostly non-tech, established-economy Fortune 500 businesses on their AI adoption. "Within the next 2-3 years AI will be able to run any business process, which makes AI one -- potentially the only one -- defensive measure the established economy has against intrusion from the high-tech world," said Boos. For now, the sci-fi hyperbole can wait.

To that end, Chris founded Arago in Germany in 1995, pushing existing boundaries in AI technology to build a general AI. Since then, Chris has led Arago to become a key partner and driver for the established economy, positioning Arago's AI HIRO as a platform for companies to reinvent their business models in the digital age. As CEO of Arago, Chris Boos' vision is to transform traditional companies into future-proof, AI-enabled enterprises – regardless of their respective industry. Arago's international client base includes IT service providers, banks and companies in the telecommunications, steel and metals industries. Chris was awarded the John F. Kennedy National Leadership Award in 2003.

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Beating the AI opponents in a strategy game is the first step any gamer takes before heading online where the real challenge is. Whether they cheat or not, most game AIs are beatable, often with simple, repeatable strategies once you find their weak points. Named HIRO (Human Intelligence Robotically Optimized), the algorithm can beat almost all players -- and that's not even its main job. Arago is an IT automation firm, which develops smart AIs that can streamline businesses and automate many of their functions. HIRO is one such AI, and while it does an excellent job of improving workflows at a number of corporations, it's the way it's trained that is most fascinating. It plays -- very well at that -- the freely available civilization-building game called Freeciv.

Arago's flagship HIRO AI product plays Freeciv, a free civilization building simulation that's based on the popular and long-lived Sid Meier's Civilization series of games – and it's getting more skilled. Freeciv is a complex, sprawling game with a huge number of possible strategies that can lead to success, especially when playing against unpredictable human opponents, but HIRO can now even best around 80 percent of human players it faces off against, as announced by Arago at TechCrunch Disrupt London 2016 on stage. How complicated can it be to succeed at a video game? Well, depending on options you select, as well as variables that can vary dramatically during the many, many turns that normally happen during any given game of Freeciv, the possibly permutations of individual games is 10 to the power of 15,000, meaning you require a very plastic AI indeed to successfully "learn" how to negotiate individual twists and turns. Games prove a common platform for testing and proving AI prowess; Google's AlphaGo is an example that has received a lot of attention for its successes.

TechCrunch Disrupt in London is on December 5-6. As well as speakers and panels, we'll be featuring some demos by some amazing tech companies. The first will be by Boston Dynamics. Yes, folks, delegates to Disrupt London will get to see one of those amazing BD robots up close and personal, almost literally in the flesh (if they had any flesh, that is). Marc Raibert, CTO and founder of Boston Dynamics will be demonstrating one of the amazing robots his team has created, but you'll have to come to find out which one… Raibert was a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and a member of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1986 through 1995.