As one of the world's largest biopharmaceutical companies, AstraZeneca pushes the boundaries of science to deliver life-changing medicines that create enduring value for patients and society. To accelerate growth through innovation, the company is expanding its use of data science and artificial intelligence (AI) across the business to improve patient outcomes. AstraZeneca has been on a multiyear journey to transform its scientific capabilities to enhance its understanding of disease, design next-generation therapeutics, pioneer new clinical approaches, and better predict clinical success. For example, as part of its efforts to unlock different human genomes, AstraZeneca is working toward the analysis of up to 2 million individual genomes by 2026. This initiative alone has generated an explosion in the quantity and complexity of data the company collects, stores, and analyzes for insights.

The ability to deploy data as a competitive business asset is what has distinguished a set of well-established, data-rich companies who have reigned as market leaders over the course of the past several decades. However, business conditions evolve, and today, these companies face a new set of challenges that threaten their hard-won leadership positions. How do these well-established data leaders transform from excellence in traditional data and analytics -- of the kind that they have deployed in recent decades -- to leadership in a new era of Big Data, AI, and machine learning driven decision-making? What do companies that have excelled at disciplines like database marketing, CRM, one-to-one marketing, and advanced analytics need to do to continue to stay on top? Data and technology are driving business change.

We were delighted to host three brilliant AI minds working in the financial sector to a panel on our AI in Finance and RegTech Summit stage last week. Speakers on this panel included Ronan Brennan, Strategy and Innovation Manager at NatWest, Mackenzie Wallace, Specialist in FinTech/RegTech at The World Bank, and David Bryan, Director of Presales at MANTA. The panel was broken down into the four themes listed below and was finished with a Q&A. MANTA also recently released a guide on how to achieve full compliance and build trust in the financial sector. Click here to access the free guide.

With the evolution of Artificial Intelligence and other technological innovations, many companies neglect what remains the main asset of any business: its human capital. Humans generate data; data is the new oil; it is the new currency. If you have the impression that you hear it before… The phrase "data is the new oil" is not mine.. but it was said -- and has been repeated since it was coined by the British mathematician Clive Humby in 2006 -- to denote this value and power in the data in our business lives. Data is not just numbers; they are texts, videos, images, audios, and all kinds of information encoded. The combination of millions, billions, trillions of information make up what we call Big Data.

After helping more than a million brick-and-mortar Chinese retailers modernize their operations, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has now set its sights on a new target: the country's outdated factories. China's largest corporation unveiled in September its first smart factory, a secret experiment that Alibaba has been conducting for three years on the outskirts of its hometown of Hangzhou. The three-story facility known as Xunxi -- translated literally as "fast rhino" -- is the company's attempt at leveraging its consumer data and technologies to help the multi-trillion-dollar manufacturing arena improve efficiency and meet rising consumer expectations. Alibaba's path to smart manufacturing started with garments, a market worth 2.2 trillion yuan ($328 billion) in China last year based on Euromonitor International's estimates. Alibaba has said that one in four clothing purchases in the country was shipped via its e-commerce platforms, granting it access to an ocean of data that it's now deploying to assist domestic garment makers in design and production planning.

After helping more than a million brick-and-mortar Chinese retailers modernize their operations, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. has now set its sights on a new target: the country's outdated factories. China's largest corporation unveiled in September its first smart factory, a secret experiment that Alibaba's been conducting for three years on the outskirts of its hometown of Hangzhou. The three-story facility known as Xunxi -- translated literally as "fast rhino" -- is the company's attempt at leveraging its consumer data and technologies to help the multi-trillion-dollar manufacturing arena improving efficiency and meet rising consumer expectations. Here is a quick peek into Alibaba's newest business. Alibaba's path to smart manufacturing starts with garments, a market worth 2.2 trillion yuan ($328 billion) in China last year based on Euromonitor International's estimates.

As governments, businesses, organisations and workers figure out how to operate in the new normal brought on by COVID-19, technology, big data, and artificial intelligence are playing an important role. Some governments are deploying contact-tracing technologies, including app-based tracking and facial recognition, to identify those who may be at risk of infection and to keep others at a distance.1 To increase workplace safety and create a sense of security among staff, many organisations may follow the lead of those governments and launch contact-tracing capabilities in the office. Technologies that protect workplace safety will be instrumental in helping employees feel secure enough to go back to the office -- and back to a semblance of normalcy. According to PwC's CFO Pulse, 41 percent of surveyed chief financial officers consider the pandemic's effects on their workforce to be a top-three concern.

As governments, businesses and organizations, and workers figure out how to operate in the new normal brought on by COVID-19, technology, big data, and artificial intelligence are playing an important role. Some governments are deploying contact-tracing technologies, including app-based tracking and facial recognition, to identify those who may be at risk of infection and to keep others at a distance. To increase workplace safety and create a sense of security among staff, many organizations may follow the lead of those governments and launch contact-tracing capabilities in the office. Technologies that protect workplace safety will be instrumental in helping employees feel secure enough to go back to the office -- and back to a semblance of normalcy. According to PwC's CFO Pulse, 41 percent of surveyed chief financial officers consider the pandemic's effects on their workforce to be a top-three concern.

We have witnessed a permanent shift in the role that data and technology are playing in investment decision-making. Idea generation techniques that had mainly been seen as emerging or experimental are now increasingly being adopted as mainstream. However, one of the biggest challenges for asset managers is how to incorporate, assimilate and integrate many of these techniques into the daily investment processes of the various investment teams. Regardless of the approach taken, data and how it is integrated and analyzed is going to play an increasingly pivotal role across all investment strategies. I will touch upon some key themes in this blog, but will go into more detail in a series to follow.

The change is being driven by numerous factors, but two are more important than all of the rest. The first is an explosion in the amount of valuable digital data generated by workers and consumers as we go about our daily lives. The second is advances in technology, such as machine learning, artificial intelligence, and cloud-computing platforms that allow us to interpret and leverage these vast amounts of data. Yet companies that excel with analytics have more than access to great data and technology. These companies recognize that success with analytics also requires an analytical mindset among its executives and an analytical culture in the business.