We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 – 28. By 2025, the World Economic Forum estimates that 97 million new jobs may emerge as artificial intelligence (AI) changes the nature of work and influences the new division of labor between humans, machines and algorithms. Specifically in banking, a recent McKinsey survey found that AI technologies could deliver up to $1 trillion of additional value each year. AI is continuing its steady rise and starting to have a sweeping impact on the financial services industry, but its potential is still far from fully realized. The transformative power of AI is already impacting a range of functions in financial services including risk management, personalization, fraud detection and ESG analytics.

We are excited to bring Transform 2022 back in-person July 19 and virtually July 20 – August 3. Join AI and data leaders for insightful talks and exciting networking opportunities. The market for engaging chatbots continues to heat up as consumers increasingly head online for purchases, creating a need for enterprises to offer a differentiated customer experience. But good, differentiated chatbots are hard to build. With the influx of users and heightened demand, companies have had to turn to any number of places to get started with chatbot technologies. And those places can either be brittle or dominated by players that don't offer much room for customization.

Some of the excesses of 2021 have shown us how digital technologies can undermine what philosophers call future "human flourishing." A lot has been written on this topic in the first few days of the new year, but take two examples -- MIT Technology Review's list of the worst excesses of technology and Fast Company's 5 best and worst tech moments of 2021 -- and it's evident how little power people affected by technologies have when things go wrong under current systems. What's also clear as we enter 2022 is that global tolerance for technology's unchecked disruption of societal institutions, conventions, and values is waning. This is the year governments will pass legislation to control the effects of digital technologies on societies, across many jurisdictions and in relation to numerous existing and emergent technologies. The EU AI and Digital Services Acts, the UK Online Safety Bill, and the US SAFE TECH Act are just a few of the efforts underway. Legislation is a marker of societal concern, but it's also clear that non-specialist, "ordinary" people have an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the relationship between technology and society.

Unpredictable spikes and drops in demand combined with chronic supply chain and labor shortages are accelerating the pace of digital transformation in manufacturing, starting with worker safety. Forty-eight percent of manufacturers say their progress on digital transformation initiatives has accelerated so much that it's years ahead of what was originally anticipated, according to a KPMG study. Keeping workers safe and connected is the primary goal of most digital transformation and hiring plans, with on-site distancing & workplace safety listed as the two highest priorities. The company's SENTRI360 platform proves effective in preventing workplace injuries and operational downtimes at several steel-heavy manufacturing companies, including Zekelman Industries and SeAH Besteel. From redesigning shop floors, to meeting social distancing guidelines, and doubling their investment in training and development, worker safety now dominates manufacturing -- even more so due to the pandemic.

Despite great efforts to unseat it, Microsoft Excel remains the go-to analytics interface in most industries -- even in the relatively tech-advanced area of finance. Could this familiar spreadsheet be the portal to futuristic quantum computing in finance? The answer is "yes," according to the principals at Multiverse Computing. This San Sebastián, Spain-based quantum software startup is dedicated to forging forward with finance applications of the quantum kind, and its leadership sees the Excel spreadsheet as a logical means to begin to make this happen. "In finance, everybody uses Excel; even Bloomberg has connections for Excel tools," said Enrique Lizaso Olmos, CEO of Multiverse Computing, which recently gained $11.5 million in a funding round headed by JME Ventures.

The Linux Foundation has announced a new permissive license designed to help foster collaboration around open data for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) projects. It has often been said that data is the new oil, but for AI and ML projects in particular, having access to expansive and diverse data sets is key to reducing bias and building powerful models capable of all manner of intelligent tasks. To machines, data is a little like "experience" is to humans -- the more of it you have, the better decisions you are likely to make. With CDLA-Permissive-2.0, the Linux Foundation is building on its previous efforts to encourage data-sharing efforts through licensing arrangements that clearly define how the data -- and any derivative data sets -- can and can't be used. The Linux Foundation first introduced the Community Data License Agreement (CDLA) back in 2017 to entice organizations to open up their vast pools of (underused) data to third-parties.

Adversarial machine learning, a technique that attempts to fool models with deceptive data, is a growing threat in the AI and machine learning research community. The most common reason is to cause a malfunction in a machine learning model. An adversarial attack might entail presenting a model with inaccurate or misrepresentative data as it's training, or introducing maliciously designed data to deceive an already trained model. As the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence's 2019 interim report notes, a very small percentage of current AI research goes toward defending AI systems against adversarial efforts. Some systems already used in production could be vulnerable to attack.

Sentieo, a financial and corporate research platform provider, today announced it has raised $20 million in a series B round led by Ten Coves Capital. Sentieo says it will use the funds to expand its market reach as it grows its workforce. Investors and corporations were already looking for opportunities to gain a competitive edge when the pandemic hit. By 2025, more than 75% of venture capital and early-stage investor executive reviews will be informed by AI and data analytics, according to a Gartner whitepaper. But as remote work became the norm last year, standalone investment research solutions hindered analysts' ability to work collaboratively.