The United Nations Agencies are tackling natural disaster management using artificial intelligence (AI) with a new 2021 Focus Group on AI for Natural Disaster Management (FG-AI4NDM). The ITU focuses on information and communications technologies (ICT) and their support of the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As noted by ITU, "facilitate international connectivity in communications networks, we allocate global radio spectrum and satellite orbits, develop the technical standards that ensure networks and technologies seamlessly interconnect, and strive to improve access to ICTs to underserved communities worldwide. Every time you make a phone call via the mobile, access the Internet or send an email, you are benefitting from the work of ITU." Relatable standards work would be in video compression (H26X series), phone area codes, performance standards in AI for healthcare, the phonetic alphabet used in radio communications, and the term "Internet of Things (IoT)" was originally coined by the ITU. As noted by WMO, "behaviour of the Earth's atmosphere, its interaction with the land and oceans, the weather and climate it produces, and the resulting distribution of water resources."

Artificial Intelligence is all over the place. If you attended our post-summit AI symposium we held during Global Summit 2018 in San Antonio, you certainly got a taste of the varied use cases where AI can make a difference. But what does it take to build an AI-powered application? Do you start implementing tedious data-gathering processes for training your models? Or do you first scour the job market for a handful of those elusive data scientist unicorns, which itself may take years?

We are living in a society where change is exponential - perhaps it has always been. What types of technologies will be foundational to our business? The disruption of Blockchain to data and databases parallels the disruption of the Internet to communications and networks. From Wall Street to Fintech Accelerators, incredible investments at Blockchain have led to incredible speed of innovation. This disruption is now ready to penetrate enterprise IT.