On a Thursday morning in early February, Kartik Sivakumar realized that he would have to leave America. He was sitting in his dorm room, at the University of Iowa, where he was a senior majoring in neuroscience. He was also a resident adviser, a leader of the university's hospital student-volunteer corps, and an organizer of the Indian Student Alliance's annual dance competition. Sivakumar had lived in Iowa for half his life. That morning, he received an e-mail from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (U.S.C.I.S.), saying that action had been taken on his change-of-status application for a student visa.

Artificial Intelligence - a rapidly advancing technology promising to transform whole industries in the next five years with profound implications for how we live and work. Or, as we hear on this week's Tech Tent, a massively overhyped buzzword for quite a mundane field of computer science which has not made any great leap forward in the last decade. That is the view we hear from Zia Chishti, who is deeply sceptical about the claims that AI is disrupting every industry on earth at breakneck speed. What is striking is that Mr Chishti is not some contrary pundit, but a computer scientist who has built two multi-billion dollar businesses, the latest devoted to using AI. Afiniti describes itself as the world's leading artificial intelligence solutions provider and helps its clients use machine-learning techniques to interact with their customers.

Says we're only at the beginning of what could be a 10-year, or longer, transformation in customer service. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are all the rage. Last week, one of the many companies applying the technology to customer experience, Afiniti, was center stage (literally and figuratively) for not one but two contact center solution providers whose customer bases include some of the largest companies in the world. As Brent Kelly, of KelCor, covered in a No Jitter post on Tuesday, April 24, Avaya forged a strategic partnership with Afiniti, which had already been one of its A.I.Connect development partners. The very morning that press release hit, I was sitting in Las Vegas at Aspect Customer Experience (ACE), the company's annual user event, waiting to hear the CEO of Afiniti, Zia Chishti.

Meet Zia Chishti, the person who likes to show his investors that Pakistan is safe and they need to understand the country to understand his company. Recently, Chishti embarked off a helicopter- skiing his way downhill in the northern snow capped peaks of Pakistan, with the aim to convince investors, clients and CEOs that the nation that was once recalled by the economist as'the world's most dangerous place' is officially safe for business and everyday living. Chishti, gathered a group from several countries including Alessandro Benetton, a heir to a billionaire family and owner to the iconic Italian clothing company, and Huawei Technologies Co. rotating CEO Guo Ping earlier this year in Pakistan. An Afiniti ski group enjoys the Karakoram mountain range. Last month, his artificial intelligence company -Afiniti- signed a deal with Huawei.

Think back to the last time you had to call a real, live person in order to complete a purchase or have a problem resolved. Did you and the customer service representative you spoke to have trouble understanding one another in some fundamental way? Or was it a smooth interaction, almost as if the CSR you spoke with was carefully hand-picked for you by robots? If it's the latter, it might be because the CSR you spoke with was in fact carefully hand-picked for you by robots. That's what the call-center tool Afiniti is out to do, the Wall Street Journal reports.