Perhaps "artificial" is too artificial of a word for the AI equation. Augmented intelligence describes the essence of the technology in a more elegant and accurate way. AI has been around for some time, and Dr. David Bray, executive director of the People-Centered Internet, sees the current "third wave" of AI as a convergence of neural networks, deep learning, pattern matching, Internet of Things, and scaling tasks beyond human limitations. AI's power and potential arises from pairing humans and machines, so that "the human is learning from the machine and, at the same time, the machine is learning from the human. Bray explored the possibilities of augmented intelligence in with a recent CXOTalk interview, where he was joined by Fred Laluyaux, CEO and President of Aera Technology. The discussion was hosted by Michael Krigsman, founder of CXOTalk and well-known industry commentator. Are organizations ready to embrace the power of augmented intelligence? Business leaders or C-level executives "intuitively know that the way they organize and the way decisions are being made in their organization is not sufficient anymore," he explains. "The way decisions are made has not really fundamentally evolved.

"Today, AI augments what we do, but in the future you'll see decisions made by (AI) entities," said Bernt Wahl, executive director of the Brain Machine Consortium. Wahl argues a logical progression of technological advances will result in smarter, more proactive AI systems. "With the web we created all these search engines and collected all this information," said Wahl, adding that systems like IBM's Watson now help determine whether all that information being collected is accurate. "In the future we'll have a'wisdom engine' that can take the knowledge we know is accurate and make decisions based on that,' he said. Jack Berkowitz, vice president of products and data science for Oracle's Adaptive Intelligence effort said AI has proven useful in helping companies filter the massive amounts of new data they're accumulating. "We call our program adaptive intelligence because it's about learning and adaptation and keeping pace," said Berkowitz. "Companies that try to keep up using the kind of rules-based systems we've had for years won't be able to.

It has long been a dream of many CFOs to have within arm's reach a crack team of financial analysts who can provide rich insights on trends and possibilities hiding deep in data. Well, the unimaginable might finally be imaginable. Artificial intelligence -- or, at this moment, the foundational layers of AI -- holds the promise of extracting the kind of valuable financial information that will set companies free to confidently take chances and explore new opportunities. That promise has been foreseen by tech industry analysts and executives who believe that, while the first chapters of AI for finance are just now being written, it's nonetheless the right time to start looking at a technology that could revolutionize finance. "The ability of machines to crunch numbers is phenomenal," said Leon Katsnelson, director and CTO of analytic platform emerging technologies at IBM. "But they still try to emulate a gut feel, and it's not really a gut feel. In a way, cognitive learning is a way to build up gut feel. And you don't have to be a math scientist wearing a white lab coat to use this technology."