The EU's AI Act promises to mitigate the harmful use of machine intelligence but will require deeper education and evangelization to ensure more transparent and ethical use of AI, notes Ursula Morgenstern, Cognizant's President of Global Growth Markets. With new regulations proposed, AI ethics -- like data privacy -- has become a top priority for companies. As heads of state from European Union member nations begin to take up discussion of the EU's proposed Artificial Intelligence (AI) Act, companies are exploring what it will take to adhere to one of the first major policy initiatives focused on harmful AI. The answer is clear: Compliance will require business to educate and evangelize across their organizations. While it will likely take two years for these new rules to come into effect, it's not too soon to begin preparing.

According to Cognizant Center for the Future of Work research, in the post-pandemic world, payers find themselves uniquely positioned to leverage technologies to spur innovation and efficiencies, says Bill Shea a Vice President within Cognizant Consulting's Healthcare Practice. Payers emerged from the pandemic relatively unscathed, but as businesses move to digital channels, their mandate is clear: deploy advanced technologies to create efficiencies, generate revenue, and spur innovation to meet customer needs. Chatbots, the Internet of Things (IoT), and big data have emerged as top focal areas for payers, with many achieving wide-scale implementation. With machines to supplement and in some cases, extend human work, many payers are well-positioned to do just that. Cognizant's Center for the Future of Work (CFoW), working with Oxford Economics, recently surveyed 4,000 C-level executives globally, including 50 senior healthcare payers in the U.S. to understand how this agenda is moving forward.

As advancements like digital humans, machine learning, robotic process automation and quantum computing fuse, captains of business will soon have the technological wherewithal to reach greater heights and fend off exogenous events says Ben Pring, chief futurist within Cognizant's Center for the Future of Work. The story of technology is the story of "stacks." From client/server and the Four Horsemen of the New Economy (Cisco, Sun, Oracle, EMC) to SMAC (social, mobile, analytics and cloud) to full stack, each wave of technology development and progress has been built on the interaction of different technologies that create something worth more than the sum of its parts. Now, a new stack is emerging with the potential to upend the IT industry again, in the way that new stacks always have, creating a new set of winners and losers in the process. The new stack -- DIGITALL -- is built on four key components: digital humans, machine learning, robotic process automation (RPA) and quantum computing.