The AI Factory for AgriFood is the third class of the Microsoft AI factory, which aims to support start-ups specialising in artificial intelligence. The programme is organised around five major economic and societal challenges: health, environment & energy, transportation, financial services and agrifood. The AI Factory for Agrifood aims to accelerate the digital transformation of the food sector by helping start-ups to continue their development in artificial intelligence and cloud computing. Specifically, Danone and Microsoft said they hope to encourage projects serving regenerative agriculture (soil health, animal welfare, support for farmers), sustainable food, waste minimisation and optimisation of supply chains. The accelerator will take a'full ecosystem' approach, reflecting Danone's'One Planet, One Health' vision, which links human and planetary health across the venue chain.

Novartis and Microsoft plan to use artificial intelligence to develop new drugs faster, and with greater precision. Novartis and Microsoft have agreed to a five-year partnership to use artificial intelligence (AI) to develop new drugs faster, and with greater precision. Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan said AI's potential for personalized medicine is particularly promising, as it will help classify subgroups of patients that new drugs will most likely benefit, using clinical and preclinical datasets. Narasimhan added that these datasets were consolidated from Novartis' internal information, surmounting integration obstacles. The ultimate goal of the alliance is to use AI to fuel research, development, manufacturing, finance, sales, marketing, and acquisitions.

You may not have noticed, but artificial intelligence has already arrived. AI systems are used today to identify your friends' faces in Facebook photos, cue up recommended videos on YouTube and help your Siri voice assistant talk. Hoping to build on these uses, Amazon, Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft said Wednesday they've created a new group called the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society. The nonprofit's primary missions include researching AI, creating guidelines in developing new AI tech and advancing the public's understanding of AI -- perhaps helping allay fears that robots may want to kill us or take our jobs (or both). The Partnership on AI isn't intended as a lobbying group.