Artificial intelligence (AI) specialist Unith (UNT) has called a trading halt in order to tap investors for some fresh funding. The company entered the trading halt on Thursday morning citing the planned capital raise, though it has not yet revealed the details of the raise. At this stage, shares will resume trade by market open on Monday morning, by which stage Unith plans to have announced how much it seeks to raise and how it will go about raising the funds. The company is fresh off a major rebranding in late-2022 when it changed its name from Crowd Media to Unith to better reflect the ongoing development of its "clean, commercial and agile" conversational AI technology. The company's core Talking Head technology is designed to humanise chatbots and improve business-human interactions.

The Telstra Corporation Ltd (ASX: TLS) share price is currently up as its artificial intelligence play makes headlines. The telco giant is going to work with Woolworths Group Ltd (ASX: WOW) controlled Quantium to help accelerate its use of AI, according to reporting by the Australian Financial Review. The AFR reported that Telstra and Quantium form a joint venture that will start by developing products and services for Telstra's enterprise customers in industries like mining, agribusiness and logistics. Telstra can provide the data, whilst the analytics and AI capabilities will be provided by Quantium. The Telstra CEO, Andy Penn, believes that this partnership will mean that it will be able to attract some of the top data talent.

Advanced Human Imaging (AHI) has completed due diligence and entered an agreement with Triage Technologies, while also announcing another key deal. The medical imaging company came out of a voluntary suspension to announce today it's planning to acquire musculoskeletal assessment (MSK) company Physimax Technologies. The Israeli-based business has developed a video-based objective solution that tracks and improves MSK wellness and performance via footage capture using a mobile phone. AHI has signed a letter of intent ahead of the proposed acquisition, agreeing to pay US$6 million (around A$7.75 million) in consideration for Physimax as well as an additional US$2 million (about A$2.58 million) as part of an earn-in agreement. "Physimax would be a welcome addition to the AHI MultiScan platform. The Physimax team has spent seven years developing, validating and commercializing the technology and has seen broad acceptance of the application worldwide with over 250,000 scans performed to date," AHI CEO Vlado Bosanac said.

While the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) makes a global name for itself by implementing one of the only real use cases for distributed ledger technology (DLT) in its blockchain-based CHESS replacement project, its CIO Dan Chesterman has detailed a handful of other tech-related initiatives the "large regulated fintech" is also undertaking. Speaking with ZDNet at VMworld in San Francisco last week, Chesterman said his organisation is looking into the application of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), highlighting that in the ASX's context, there are a lot of examples where machines are making quite clever decisions. "The main exploration we've been doing of artificial intelligence in that AI/ML space has been in market announcements ... it's not in production, it's something we're doing as a proof of concept," he said. "And what we've come to the conclusion of is that we certainly see, in that sort of context, there is actually a serious consequence for any error." Market announcements, for example, is one element of the business where Chesterman said AI could both help, but also cause legal dilemmas.

Artificial Intelligence, high-speed mobile internet, big data analytics and cloud technology are the four key technologies that will shape the world over the next four years says the top global business forum. A new report from the World Economic Forum (WEF), The Future of Jobs Report 2018, says the years between now and 2022 will be a hotbed for high-tech investment by companies across every industry. While the report finds that the "Fourth Industrial Revolution" will create more new jobs than it destroys, artificial intelligence will have a significant impact in the next four years. In 2018 about 29 per cent of total "task hours" are performed by machines in 12 industries studied by the WEF. By 2022 the average is expected to shift to 42 per cent performed by machines.

Artificial intelligence has the potential to deliver global economic activity of about $13 trillion by 2030, a new report says -- giving investors in ASX-listed AI stocks a reason to smile. 'Notes from the frontier: Modeling the impact of AI on the world economy' is a new report from McKinsey & Company look at the future impact AI will have on our lives and the way we do business. It finds that AI has a huge potential to contribute to global economic activity (while warning that adoption of AI could widen gaps among countries, companies and workers). McKinsey estimates that by 2030 some 70 per cent of companies might have adopted at least one type of AI technology somewhere in their business. That's good news for the 30 or so ASX stocks who have some form of exposure to the technology, whether it be futuristic computer chips, makers of AI apps or companies leveraging AI to improve efficiency.

Aussie investors have eagerly embraced Initial Public Offerings (IPO's) in the past few years, especially in companies operating in "hot" sectors like technology. Unfortunately, many of these stocks see significant drops in share price following a hot start. One stock breaking that trend dramatically is Appen Limited (ASX), debuting on the ASX on 7 January of 2015. The share price has been on a steady climb since and is now up over 800% from its first day of trading. The Appen website describes the company as a global leader in the development of high-quality, human-annotated datasets for machine learning and artificial intelligence.