Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been a key topic in the technology industry and continues to trend in the media with the adoption from a variety of sectors and disciplines. From banking and financial services to healthcare and life services, the implementation of AI continues to prosper as AI assists in increasing efficiency, improving customer experience and growing revenue. With this in mind, it is interesting to consider how methods of data analysis can further increase opportunities and lower risks for all industries on a global scale. The composition of AI is incredibly detailed and so for this particular blog post, we will be focusing on one specific subset of AI - machine learning (ML). Machine learning is a method of data analysis that essentially trains a machine how to solve a problem. ML models function by looking for patterns in data and attempting to draw conclusions independently based on large amounts of hand-crafted, structured data.

As we heard recently ahead of this year's British Science Festival, widespread acceptance of automated technologies could be held back due to public fear. Even Prince Charles has been vocal about his concerns of a world dominated by machines. Despite this scepticism, in the business world, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is no longer just futuristic. Although it is still emerging, it is already enabling companies to rapidly change work processes to make them more fluid, or completely reimagine them altogether. To move past the speculation and amplify human work in a tangible way, businesses must put human intuition in the middle of data analytics and advanced algorithms – we call this'augmented intelligence.'

In the cognitive era, there will be no phone trees or on-hold music. There will be no language barriers or semantic errors. There will be no unanswerable questions or unsolvable problems. There will only be exceptional customer service, brought to you by cognitive businesses creating solutions that continuously learn and adapt to outthink the needs of the market. That time, the cognitive era, is already here.

Yesterday, IBM opened its first Machine Learning Hub in Bengaluru. The company hopes that the Hub will allow engineers, data professionals, business analysts and organizations to greatly benefit and learn through collaboration with like-minded organisations. IBM says that various enterprises will now have an opportunity to work closely with IBM data experts to understand the technology to analyze, visualize and interpret data. The Bengaluru ML hub is an addition to IBM's growing ML Hubs, similar to the ones in Toronto, San Jose, California, Beijing, Boblingen, and at IBM's Silicon Valley Lab. According to IBM, their experts will also assist visitors build and test rapid, scalable prototypes for fast deployment of their models.

Blockchain transforms select financial service applications. In 1998, Nick Szabo wrote a short paper entitled "The God Protocol." Szabo mused about the creation of a be-all end-all technology protocol, one that designated God the trusted third party in the middle of all transactions. This trust protocol provides a global distributed ledger that changes the way data is stored and transactions are processed. The blockchain runs on computers distributed worldwide where the chains can be viewed by anyone.

Technological innovation is continuing to accelerate on a hockey stick growth curve. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon are bringing cognitive computing capability to the masses. And it's only a matter of time until nearly every aspect of our work and personal lives are impacted. These advances are still relatively new. Time will tell when and how they change things, but it will happen, and it will happen quickly.

According to the recent IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) report, "Analytics: Dawn of the Cognitive Era," almost three-quarters of more than 6,000 organizations have the data and analytics capabilities needed to start their cognitive journey. The rapid clip at which things have changed is almost mind-boggling. When the IBM IBV analytics team began this research series in 2010, the focus was on educating executives about how analytics could create value because most still relied on gut instincts and limited descriptive data. By 2012, the majority of organizations were using diagnostic and predictive analytics. The seventh annual IBV analytics research study finds that 74 percent of organizations are pervasively using at least one type of prescriptive analysis within their organization. And once a majority of organizations achieve widespread use of an analytics level, the competitive advantage evolves to the next level of analytics maturity.

Harriet Green tells us she is very excited about the prospect of the cognitive era. And so she should be. The former Thomas Cook CEO, switched holidays for robots, when she joined IBM in 2015 to head up its Watson, Internet of Things, commerce and education department. "IoT is just an amazing force of the digitisation movement – connecting things to people," she tells Essential Retail. "It's really all about Watson's ability to take vast amounts of structured and unstructured data and process that data, whether its smell, sound, video or text."

We hear it every day on the news: malicious hackers trying to wage on systems and business networks stealing data that they can then sell on the dark web. The increasingly sophisticated attack methods make it harder and harder for cybersecurity specialists to keep up the pace. Artificial intelligence such as IBM Watson for Cybersecurity can change how information security specialists defend against cyberattacks. Cognitive computing can blend human-generated security knowledge with more traditional security data, enabling computers to learn from data in a similar way to humans. Cyber security in the form of cognitive has the potential to significantly reduce incident response times, optimise the precision of alerts and keep up-to-date with the latest threat research.

Blockchain transforms select financial service applications. In 1998, Nick Szabo wrote a short paper entitled "The God Protocol." Szabo mused about the creation of a be-all end-all technology protocol, one that designated God the trusted third party in the middle of all transactions. This trust protocol provides a global distributed ledger that changes the way data is stored and transactions are processed. The blockchain runs on computers distributed worldwide where the chains can be viewed by anyone.