In the post pandemic era, global supply chains are restructured and dramatically changed. As industries around the world accelerate their digital transformation to create new business opportunity, the technologies of 5G and AIoT are becoming the key driving forces. The mainstream sectors such as healthcare, retail and manufacturing continue increase the market demands. SYNNEX, an industry leader in IT distribution, hosts 5G and AIoT on-line event named "High speed connection to enable smart applications" in December 2021. The invited keynote speakers are from Microsoft Taiwan, Intel and ITRI.

"The thing that really attracted me to Formula 1 is that it's always been about data and technology," says Graeme Hackland, Williams Group IT director and chief information officer of Williams Racing. Since joining the motorsport racing team in 2014, Hackland has been putting that theory into practice. He is pursuing what he refers to as a data-led digital transformation agenda that helps the organization's designers and engineers create a potential competitive advantage for the team's drivers on race day. Hackland explains to VentureBeat how Williams F1 is looking to exploit data to make further advances up the grid and how emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing, might help in that process. This interview has been edited for clarity.

This is the consensus view of an MIT Technology Review Insights survey of 210 members of technology executives, conducted in March 2021. These respondents report that they need--and still often lack-- the ability to develop new digital channels and services quickly, and to optimize them in real time. Underpinning these waves of digital transformation are two fundamental drivers: the ability to serve and understand customers better, and the need to increase employees' ability to work more effectively toward those goals. Two-thirds of respondents indicated that more efficient customer experience delivery was the most critical objective. This was followed closely by the use of analytics and insight to improve products and services (60%).

As an increasing number of organizations drive AI-powered digital transformation, several key trends in operationalizing AI are emerging. Growth leaders are separating themselves from growth laggards by using AI and machine learning (ML) in modern application development. Below are some statistics provided by 451 Research: Leaders invest in models for digital transformation: More than half the digital transformation leaders adopted ML compared to less than 25 percent of laggards. Furthermore, 62 percent of enterprises are developing their own models. Prevalence of DevOps increases the demand for automation: 94 percent of enterprise companies have now adopted DevOps. Models are becoming integral to the development of enterprise apps—requiring continuous, synchronized and automated development and deployment lifecycles. Data science and DevOps/app teams collaborate more: In 33 percent of enterprises, the data science/data analytics team is the primary DevOps stakeholder. An increasing number of application developers are becoming interested in data science and AI, and many have already learned the fundamentals…

A few decades back, it would have been impossible to imagine the way we communicate, interact or transact on social and economic fronts today. Similarly, today it's very hard to fathom the real potential of'blockchain', despite the promises it has. Blockchain today is still in its infancy, and its mainstream value is yet to be realized. While, it's for sure that blockchain will disrupt the existing solutions, not only in industry and commerce but in almost all aspects of our day-to-day lives, but it cannot do so just by itself. Same holds true for Internet of Things (IoT) as well as for Artificial Intelligence (AI), though in different perspectives and magnitudes.

TechSee, a global leader in Visual Customer Assistance powered by AI and Augmented Reality, announced that it has joined the Pega Independent Software Vendor (ISV) Partner Program. The Pega ISV Partner Program extends clients' Pega investments with readily available, out-of-the-box solutions to further accelerate their time to market. Pega is the leader in cloud software for customer engagement and operational excellence. Its AI-powered software helps the world's leading organizations optimize customer interactions on any channel while ensuring their brand promises are kept. Pega's low-code application development platform allows enterprises to quickly build and evolve apps to meet their customer and employee needs and drive digital transformation on a global scale.

IBM Thailand, the local unit of the US tech giant, is highlighting its cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies as a way to help drive business transformation to ensure organisations thrive following the Covid-19 crisis. Ms Patama says artificial intelligence and cloud technology are crucial to help companies digitally transform. "Over the past four months, Covid-19 has accelerated Thailand's digital transformation, which was earlier expected to take shape over three years," Patama Chantaruck, vice-president for Indochina expansion and managing director of IBM Thailand, told the Bangkok Post. The pandemic has forced organisations, including those in the business, government and education sectors, to proceed with stress tests for their business and financial models as well as management of their operations and workforce, she said. Organisations need to revisit their business mission, vision and value and consider whether they still cater to customer needs.

The main pillar of the plan is focused on accelerating Mexico's digital transformation through democratizing the access to technology. The company announced plans to establish a new cloud datacenter region in Mexico to deliver its intelligent and trusted cloud services to serve Mexico's public entities, organizations and Mexican society, including Microsoft Azure, Office 365, Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. This datacenter region is an important part of Microsoft's $1.1 billion investment plan in Mexico over the next five years. The plan also includes a robust education and skilling program with different initiatives the first one being the creation of three laboratories and a virtual classroom, in collaboration with public universities to create an education platform for digital skills, to expand employability in future generations. The first initiative of the commitment to apply artificial intelligence to create societal impact is an investment in the project "Artificial Intelligence to Monitor Pelagic Sharks in the Mexican Pacific Ocean" (Shark ID), focused on the conservation of Mako shark species, driven by Mexico Azul, as part of the initiative AI for Earth, creating societal impact.

On Friday, King Salman of Saudi Arabia issued a royal decree to establish a National Centre for Artificial Intelligence (AI) in KSA to drive innovation and the digital transformation of the country, as declared by Abdullah Al-Sawaha from the Saudi Minister of Communications and Information Technology.

The United Nations reports that about 1/3 of the food produced globally each year is lost or wasted, and I'd reckon that number is not too surprising. Those of us in the United States see evidence of waste each time we go out to eat or do a weekly purge of jam-packed refrigerators. Outside the waste, however, there's a greater problem many of us don't realize. Just as the amount of food wasted globally is skyrocketing, the global demand for food is, ironically, set to rise. How will we manage to feed and sustain 9 billion humans estimated to populate planet earth by 2050?