From yesterday's ground-breaking AI innovations to tomorrow's Metaverse, technology is advancing at a never-before-seen rate With new developments fighting for priority in today's modern tech stack, the challenge for leaders is to identify what advancements are relevant today and which are still in the realms of fiction for the foreseeable future. Whether companies call it digitisation or transformation, the vast majority of organisations are moving everything to the cloud at pace. However, having heavily invested a large number of resources into cloud transition, fewer organisations prioritise the subsequent phases that ramp up cloud return. These subsequent phases provide the foundation for cloud ROI – improving operations, forecasts and predictions using ML and data science for revenue. Hyperscalers build products that drive all kinds of business cases, but the benefits cannot be realised without a sound foundational cloud.

In 2021, the UK has found itself under the bright lights of the world stage many times. A global audience has watched our pandemic response, the fruition of BREXIT and, most recently, the UK's COP26 presidency. So, why has the UK's AI and wider tech scene still not made it close to global superpower status that we see from China, Russia and the US? The results of the government's recent National AI Strategy are yet to be seen, but I predict there is deeper change needed. A thriving AI industry needs a combination of education, ambition, and nurtured innovation.

Looked at on a world scale, the Covid-19 pandemic will continue to deliver shocks to global supply chains for some time to come. Even if the public health crisis abates in the UK, our economy is part of a global economy, and UK corporate IT will have its work cut out in supporting companies as they are forced to re-forge supply chains, perhaps over and over again, and at short notice. The crisis has provoked some rethinking of how the world economy ought to work, with an emphasis on the desirability of a shift from efficiency – doing things "just in time" – to resilience – building in more slack. The FT's Rana Faroohar provides an account of such rethinking in an article entitled From'just in time' to'just in case' published earlier this year. In the discussions which lie behind this article there are different emphases on a spectrum of opinion: some say we can have both efficiency and resilience equally, others that there is a choice to be made for one or the other, and yet others say it's a matter of balance, of trading off. Tony Harris, global vice-president of business network solutions at SAP, says it has to be a combination. "You wouldn't want to move to a resilient network or supply chain that wasn't also efficient," he says.

Infosys Consulting begs to differ: 2019 will be the age of the Rockstar CIO who orchestrates AI across the organisation and manages to capture substantial business value. As AI becomes ever-more central to strategic and operational success, CIOs will have to relinquish their backroom roles and take centre stage – whether they like it or not. So, what do they need to be aware of to ensure that they can lead their organisation's AI-powered digital transformation in 2019?. When it comes to AI we've been slow to recognise the importance of the human factor. In the next 12 months, the organisations that will be successful with AI will be the ones that bring AI out of the lab and empower users across every business department to apply the technology to solve day-to-day problems.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the most hyped technologies around, touted to disrupt industries and entire ways of working. John Gikopoulos, Global Head of Artificial Intelligence & Automation at Infosys Consulting, reflects on five of the biggest artificial intelligence developments that can be expected this year. AI will have the most revolutionary impact on our personal and working lives of perhaps any technology in recent memory. While the technology enjoyed much hype in 2018, 2019 will be the year when AI's true impact becomes unavoidable. But its effects will reach beyond products and devices – AI will transform job roles and create new industries; it will spawn new challengers that will threaten long-established businesses that fail to plan adequately for the brave new world of artificial intelligence.

As part of Information Age's Artificial Intelligence Month, we are providing three CTO guides over the coming weeks on artificial intelligence: what it is, the industries most impacted and implementation best practices. The first guide discussed how business leaders and CTOs understand artificial intelligence; and how they define the technology in the context of business. Opinions ranged from AI being just an algorithm, to a spectrum of technologies that are already active in everyday life. In this guide, seven CTOs and AI experts provide their view on what is artificial intelligence; and how they define the technology in the context of business. This is the second guide, and will focus on the industries that AI will impact the most, with insights from CTOs and AI experts.

As part of Information Age's Artificial Intelligence Month, we are providing three CTO guides over the coming weeks on artificial intelligence: what it is, the industries most impacted and implementation best practices. In the dictionary, artificial intelligence is defined as: the theory and development of computer systems able to perform tasks normally requiring human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages. This guide will focus on what is artificial intelligence, in the context of business, with insights from CTOs and AI experts. Harald Gölles, the CTO of omni:us, says that -- broadly -- "artificial intelligence (AI) is the exploration and development of intelligent behaviour in machines". "Businesses can rely on dedicated AI solutions to take automation to the next level and solve complex practices that are often too complicated and costly to maintain."