LAS VEGAS – Amazon Web Services (AWS) chief executive officer Andy Jassy highlighted 27 new services during his keynote at the company's eighth annual re:Invent learning and education conference and urged customers not to procrastinate in starting their digital transformations. He told the 65,000 attendees that not all of the key components in the process are technology elements. First, he said, the senior leadership team needs to be aligned behind the effort. Without that, it's easy for dissenters to block the initiatives. Second, set top-down aggressive goals.

The World Cup 2018 is all over. Germany was kicked out in the group stages, Brazil was beaten by Belgium, football didn't come home to England, Croatia with its population of four million people reached the final for the first time ever, only to lose to France in the end. Beyond being glued to our screens to watch the action on pitch, we've been looking at what newsrooms are doing off-pitch to cover the competition… with automation and artificial intelligence. Fox Sports (US) teamed up with IBM Watson to make AI-powered highlight videos, French publication Le Figaro created automated visual summaries, and The Times (UK) launched its very own World Cup Alexa Skill. The US didn't qualify for the World Cup this year, but that didn't stop Fox Sports from airing all 64 matches and teaming up with IBM Watson to create the World Cup highlight machine.

Fox Sports has tapped into the potential of artificial intelligence and machine learning to deliver the innovative FIFA World Cup Highlight Machine, available through its Fox Sports App and FoxSports.com. A collaboration with IBM, the Highlight Machine is enabled by the IBM Watson computer technology. It analyzes video from the FIFA World Cup archive, as well as 2018 footage, and extracts data, allowing users to search for goals, red cards, players by name and the like. It is about creating a "compelling user experience around highlights, not just in 2018 but also previously, at leat 50 years," says David Mowrey, head of product and development at IBM Watson Media. More typically, gathering this sort of data would be a task done manually by employees, but considering the scope of the World Cup, that would be impractical, and arguably impossible, Mowrey explains, because of the enormous volume of video that is involved.