Humankind's first glimpse of an awesome new kind of intelligence occurred on December 2018, when researchers at DeepMind, the artificial-intelligence company owned by Google's parent corporation, Alphabet Inc., filed a dispatch from what one day may be recognized as a herald of next great epoch of human evolution –the "Lucy", Australopithecus afarensis, the famous early ancestor of modern humans, of the emerging "Cyborg Epoch" of hyperintelligence. A year earlier, on Dec. 5, 2017, the New York Times reported, the team had stunned the chess world with its announcement of AlphaZero, a machine-learning algorithm that had "mastered not only chess but shogi, or Japanese chess, and Go. The algorithm started with no knowledge of the games beyond their basic rules. It then played against itself millions of times and learned from its mistakes. In a matter of hours, the algorithm became the best player, human or computer, the world has ever seen."

It is 8.30am and Britain's most eminent scientist is taking a windswept stroll through Dorset's rolling hills. It seems hard to believe that James Lovelock – sprightly despite a walking stick and bristling with a fierce, bright-eyed intelligence – will turn 100 this week. But the man known for proposing one of the most visionary scientific theories of the last century starts the day just as he always does, with a brisk walk from his coastguard's cottage by the shores of Chesil Beach with his beloved wife, Sandy. That Lovelock is conscious of his own mortality is to be expected. But that he is also musing on the future of the Earth he will never live to see – one which involves cyborgs, no less – is, perhaps, rather more surprising.

"AI will both create and destroy value… There will be creative destruction… Policies should protect people, not jobs… Companies and the government's focus should be on skills" – Professor John Van Reenen, economist at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) These words from the sphere of academia closely resonate with the business advisory work that Capgemini's Christopher Stancombe (Head of Industrialization and Automation, Capgemini) and Xavier Hochet (Head of Europe, Capgemini's Business Services) have been heading up recently. Their shared viewpoint is that the current wave of technological innovation will have a much greater impact than any such wave before it. As such, it is ushering in a new age of hyperintelligence, where people will work collaboratively with machines to achieve previously unobtainable outcomes. This is bringing about a fundamental rethinking of how businesses operate and organize themselves. The series will provide insights, challenges, and new perspectives to decision-makers across all areas of business today – from IT practitioners and HR managers, to CIOs and chief executives.

MicroStrategy, the long-standing Enterprise BI pure-play is -- literally -- ringing in the new year with a new version of its platform. To celebrate the new release, appropriately dubbed MicroStrategy 2019, MStrat's Founder and CEO Michael J. Saylor and his team are ringing the bell at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square this morning. I hope MStrat can bring good luck to the markets this morning, but the company certainly has some interesting new features to make their customers happy, even if Nasdaq investors end up having a rough day. As explained to me by Marge Breya, MicroStrategy's CMO and Hugh Owen, the company's SVP of Product Marketing, these new features fall under three pillars: "HyperIntelligence," "transformational mobility," and "federated analytics." While these names are clearly the result of carefully crafted product marketing, there is genuine merit and utility to be found in the MicroStrategy 2019.