Workday held its European Rising conference last year. One of the key themes from the event was how it is embedding AI into its solutions. Having spoken to Chano Fernandez, Co-President Workday early in the week, we also spoke to Barbry McGann, SVP Product Management at Workday later in the conference. The conversation centred around the main message that Workday delivered at its latest conference, AI. One of its recent product innovations was Skills Cloud.

Earlier this year, Enterprise Times talked with Orli Gan, Head of Products for Threat Detection at Checkpoint. Gan had just given a keynote where she told the audience that AI was not a silver bullet for cyber security. It's an interesting view that is aimed at resetting expectations of what the technology is able to deliver today. Orli believes that the challenge is the immaturity of the technology. The current generations of algorithms have deficiencies and flaws that mean today, they are not as accurate as we need them to be.

Enterprise Times spoke to Bas de Vos, Director of IFS Labs. He has been in charge of IFS Labs at arguably one of the most exciting times for technology research and development. The conversation was animated and full of information about what the Labs has achieved, what it is working on now and where de Vos sees technology potentially go in the future. We discussed Artificial Intelligence and de Vos views AI as a set of technologies that enable people to make products better. As with most things, he reflects the pragmatic view that IFS has around both R&D and new technology.

Icertis has announced two new applications powered by Artificial Intelligence for the Icertis Contract Management (ICM) platform: ICM DigitizeAI and ICM DiscoverAI. The new applications leverage the Microsoft AI services from the Azure platform to leverage the data found in contracts. ICM DigitizeAI imports legacy contracts and maps attributes and clauses contained therein. This allows better analysis of contracts, mapping similarities and identifying variations between clauses. ICM DiscoverAI analyses the data collected and matches clauses and attributes found in every clause to common clause libraries.

Oracle has announced that it is leveraging its AI capabilities to deliver a better consumer experience to attendees of Heineken Urban Polo. Heineken Urban Polo is a series of events in New Zealand cities that combines polo, fine cuisine and music. The Oracle Intelligent Bot will answer questions about the event through a Facebook interface. It enables attendees to ask questions about how to get there, where the bar is, what times the matches start, when the pony parade is on, rules of the game, details of players, which DJs are playing and when. As more people interact with the bot it will apply machine learning to improve its answers about the various subjects.

Your organisation is wasting money. Hard-earned money that could be spent on other things. Your procurement and commercial teams spend hours negotiating the pricing components of your supplier contracts. However, once those contracts are signed, where do they go? You might proactively manage your top 20 suppliers pretty tightly, but the rest of these contracts probably languish in your "repository".

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is beginning to move from a nascent technology into one that is beginning to have an impact on our lives. We already have examples such as shopping bots and voice technologies that answer our questions, order goods and help run our daily lives. Cybersecurity vendors would have us believe that they are all using AI to detect attacks and keep us safe. But is everything as it seems? Check Point Software, CPX360 show is in Barcelona this week.

One of the key messages from Oracle Openworld this week is that Oracle has spent millions of its R&D budget developing its capability within Artificial Intelligence. This is not the AI of science fiction or even cognitive computing. Perhaps that was wise after the Robert Schank blog critiscised IBM for its use of the wording and its marketing claims. Oracle is wisely leveraging the phrase machine learning. As Larry Ellison, Founder and CTO explained in his keynote, machine learning is the: "first branch of AI that really, really works. He went on to give several examples of this. Autonomous vehicles where computers will soon drive cars more safely than humans. Facial recognition machine learning helps computers recognise individuals far better than humans can. Using the phrase machine learning is a key change of focus. However, Oracle is still using the phrase AI across some of its offerings. Despite this it is telling customers that this is a very focused offeringT. Oracle has also embedded machine learning into its SaaS products as well. This new functionality is called Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Apps. The most important of these for customers is the work that Oracle has done around AI. They have added AI apps across each of their cloud SaaS solutions. This includes CX cloud suite where it will deliver smart offers and propose actions. For ERP it can offer optimised support terms for SCM optimised demand and for HCM best fit candidates. Miranda explained how Oracle is developing algorithms to help customers increase automation within their business. Ultimately, he said "It will apply to everything". Miranda commented:"The new Adaptive Intelligent Apps enable business users from across the organizations to quickly and easily take advantage of the latest advancements in artificial intelligence.

The last year has seen a move by IT vendors to introduce increasing amounts of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and cognitive systems. How well the solutions meet the claims made by vendors is not part of this article. What is important is that companies are feeding these systems vast amounts of data to do advanced analytics. The advantage of using these systems is that they are able to deliver solutions far faster than data scientists and security analysts can. For business units, this is good news.

Salesforce has announced Service Cloud Einstein to deliver artificial intelligence solutions to customer service agents. Salesforce pushed Einstein, its AI platform, heavily at Dreamforce last year. It has a huge development focus on the product. This effort has culminated in the release of Einstein for Service cloud. It delivers artificial intelligence, arguably machine learning, to the service industry.