In any roundup of 2022, Elon Musk's Optimus robot waving its mechanical arms in the air is likely to be featured prominently. Musk boldly claimed that we could see a "fundamental transformation of civilization" with such advances in robotics. While his vision may take years to unfold, we are now at a juncture where we will see rapid deployment and advancement of artificial intelligence. The future is waving hello, and 2023 promises to be exciting in AI. Despite record numbers of low unemployment, companies continue to find it challenging to find employees -- especially people with the right skill sets.

Until recently, disruption in IT meant something very different than sending everybody home to work for a year. But the COVID-19 pandemic has shaken up the technology landscape, stalling some approaches and systems, while speeding the adoption of others. In our recent State of the CIO survey, tech leaders placed AI and machine learning at the top of their list of technologies most likely to significantly impact how businesses operate in 2021. IT leaders also see big data and analytics having a distinct impact, along with less widely adopted technologies such as blockchain. We reached out to IT leaders and industry analysts to get their take on which technologies pose the most disruptive potential in 2021, with some offering perspective on which technologies might be in favor as the pandemic subsides.

SafeGuard, a cloud platform designed to protect assets from cybersecurity threats and risk factors, today announced it has raised $45 million in a mix of equity and debt. SafeGuard, which was founded in 2014, develops products that identify risks in communication channels such as social media, chat apps, and collaboration platforms -- like Slack, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp. SafeGuard also helps companies take action and claims it can shield high-profile or targeted individuals from account takeovers, spearphishing, malicious content, threats of violence, and misinformation, as well as bad actor connections. To this end, SafeGuard leverages an AI-powered engine called Threat Cortex that detects and spotlights risks across different attack surfaces. On the compliance side of the equation, SafeGuard offers a tool that taps AI to alert employees, customers, and partners if their digital communications are at risk of violating regulations like the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and Financial Conduct Authority.

And it's more important than ever for companies to evaluate the new technologies teams are implementing to ensure they are facilitating the desired outcomes, as well as to assess a particular technology's potential application to other areas and teams in the company. "In a sales organization, for example, certain teams may have access to certain tools that increase their productivity. Other teams might be able to benefit from that as well," says Hughell. "It's important when we bring in new technologies that we negotiate our contracts such that they're flexible, so we can determine who needs the technology." When evaluating new technologies to drive and support distributed workforces, Hughell suggests paring up individuals, which not only helps people learn, but drives adoption of the new technology and helps the company assess whether it's bringing the expected results. "I always tell my leaders inspect what you expect. Don't just buy a piece of technology, roll it out and expect miracles to happen," she says. "You have to drive adoption and usage, and you might find that it was the wrong technology and it's not serving your desired outcome or purpose, at which point, make that decision as a leader to fast fail and move on." The most important best practice is to do what's necessary to empower your employees to succeed. Providing libraries of bite-size instruction videos, for instance, can help team members learn specific features of new technology related to their work, without having to sit through long training sessions. Creating the atmosphere of learning and collaboration is as important to a company's success as implementing the new technology. "At the end of the day," says Hughell, "if you can show someone that you're going to help empower their success and help increase their productivity and reduce friction in their day-to-day operation, not many people would argue with that."

In recent years, there is growing interest in the ways the European aviation industry can leverage the multi-source data fusion towards augmented domain intelligence. However, privacy, legal and organisational policies together with technical limitations, hinder data sharing and, thus, its benefits. The current paper presents the ICARUS data policy and assets brokerage framework, which aims to (a) formalise the data attributes and qualities that affect how aviation data assets can be shared and handled subsequently to their acquisition, including licenses, IPR, characterisation of sensitivity and privacy risks, and (b) enable the creation of machine-processable data contracts for the aviation industry. This involves expressing contractual terms pertaining to data trading agreements into a machine-processable language and supporting the diverse interactions among stakeholders in aviation data sharing scenarios through a trusted and robust system based on the Ethereum platform.

This week, Infor is the latest to have announced the general availability of its digital assistant within Microsoft Teams. The integration will enable customers to access information from within their ERP systems. To do so, customers will interact with the Infor Coleman AI Digital Assistant app for Teams. The digital assistant bot was previously available via a web browser, the Infor Go mobile app, and Amazon Alexa for Business. Oddly, unlike many others, Infor has not yet added an integration.

As a business leader, you probably want to improve your organization's diversity, merit, and fairness -- whether related to hiring, advancement, teamwork, or other initiatives. For example, there's evidence that diverse teams perform better, due to an integration of different skills and perspectives, and that fair systems generate employee devotion by giving credit where credit is due. Moreover, racial, gender, and other biases in hiring, promotion, and compensation have significant legal implications for businesses and other organizations. The good news is that there are new ways to improve diversity, fairness, and merit -- with the data already on hand in your enterprise. New technology enables you to use data to surface, understand, and address issues related to diversity and performance in unprecedented and sustainable ways.

Please join the Ontology team as they tour the United States presenting their solution for a public blockchain & distributed collaboration platform. They will discuss their unique viewpoint on developing blockchain technology in China & its impact throughout the space. He is one of the first Semantic Web experts in China & has many years of experience in enterprise resource planning, digitization of government affairs, gaming platforms, & media streaming. In 2008, he joined Project Halo, a project initiated by Paul Allen, Co-Founder of Microsoft, where he worked on big data & artificial intelligence. In 2013, Hu helped set up leading fintech company Green Dot's subsidiary in China, where he developed a thorough understanding of the financial system & credit card business.

There is no shortage of training content for employees. However, quick access to the right information is the challenge. Traditionally, the L&D departments spend significant time on instructor-led training and aggregating and buying third-party training content. Other learning avenues, like on-the-job training, personalized training, micro-learning, and data or event-driven training programs are equally important. Employees today learn from content spread across internal and external systems including intranets, MooC platforms, LMS, social media platforms, external training content providers, document management systems, collaboration platforms, and even forums, Q&A portals, email and messenger/ chat platforms.

According to the World Economic Forum, "the population of the world's urban areas is increasing by 200,000 people per day, all of whom need affordable housing as well as social, transportation, and utility infrastructure." Construction needs to undergo some changes to improve project orchestration between partners, to use materials that reduce harm on the environment, and to increase efficiencies within operations to reduce costs. Construction is ranked 19 out of 20 on the scale of most technology-savvy businesses. Without technology, the industry will fail to thrive--especially since it's becoming more and more difficult to find skilled labor to cover the ever-increasing demand in the industry. The digital revolution of the past 50 years has opened new markets, sped industrialization in emerging economies, and facilitated doing business on a global basis.