And so the insurrection is beginning. Last week Japanese insurance Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance announced that it was going to be replacing 30 staff with an artificial intelligence that would be calculating payouts (although, it noted, with human oversight still making final approvals). The technology would improve productivity by 30% and the firm expected to save some 140m Yen a year (around £1m) after the 200m Yen investment. Now I'm sure that this implementation of IBM's Watson technology (remember: Watson was the man who predicted in 1943 a global market for maybe five computers) will be very whizzy. But excuse me whilst I contend that Fukoku's PR make this AI sound like every IT business case I've ever seen: cost savings through headcount reduction blah blah, productivity gains blah blah.