Today, organizations understand the pressing need to expand and enhance their digital sales and support solutions to address new customer demands. Consumers are demanding anytime, anywhere services. While many companies have bolstered their web and mobile presence, customers still turn to the contact center when they need additional support. Given this trend, businesses must modernize and improve their contact center capabilities. Five9 recently held a joint analyst call with several of its customer to share how various companies were evolving their contact centers.

Parking meters, cash registers and a professional wrestling video game have fallen foul of a computer glitch related to the Y2K bug. The Y2020 bug, which has taken many payment and computer systems offline, is a long-lingering side effect of attempts to fix the Y2K, or millennium bug. Both stem from the way computers store dates. Many older systems express years using two numbers – 98, for instance, for 1998 – in an effort to save memory. The Y2K bug was a fear that computers would treat 00 as 1900, rather than 2000.

Analysts predict that artificial intelligence and machine learning will disrupt almost every industry – education, financial services, transportation, and retail among them. But more often than not, healthcare leads their list as the top candidate. Here are a just a few examples of how these technologies are transforming the industry. Some sources cite that the average cost of bringing a new drug to market has increased to record levels – almost US$2 billion for the biggest companies. McKinsey & Company believes that Big Data strategies that result in better informed decision making could optimize innovation and improve the efficiency of research and clinical trials.

The definition of civility typically revolves around the rules, mores and assumptions for how we deal with each other. The previous talks in this series have focused on that kind of civility in a variety of human activities including sports, education, business and law enforcement. But I'm going to be talking about something that is not human--the increasingly clever computing technology that surrounds us. And how we think about, relate to and interact with this technology. For the title of this talk, I chose the most evocative term, artificial intelligence, or AI for short. It was "cooked up," as its author the mathematician John McCarthy once told me, for a grant proposal he wrote in 1955. He was seeking funds for a conference the following summer at Dartmouth College. It was a brainy marketing pitch.