What does it take to bring powerful change? Just as DevOps is bringing this to software development, you can use DevOps to power up your AI model delivery. The next wave of competitive advantage is expected to come from technology such as artificial intelligence (AI), emerging technologies like blockchain and the imperative for every company to move to the cloud. Overnight, we've the seen speed of the shift to these digital technologies go from years to months or even days. And to support this change, the number of intelligent automation and AI implementations are increasing fast.

Just coming off a great week at Web Summit and Techonomy, where Artificial Intelligence was one of the major topics of discussion and debate. Tonight, I'm excited to kick off and host our 7th annual CIO and Innovation Forum, and we will have a variety of top leaders speaking on AI and related topics. Advances in AI continue to power forward at an unprecedented pace as businesses and organizations reimagine their futures. At Accenture we believe that AI is the most disruptive technology since the industrial revolution and holds vast potential to help people do things differently and do different things. We're just beginning to understand the potential of AI technologies like computer vision, natural language processing, machine learning, deep learning, knowledge representation, expert systems, biometrics and video analytics to drive once unimaginable change.

Accenture has introduced an intelligent automation platform for application services that provides human technology workers with better productivity and insights to enhance business performance. The platform, Accenture myWizard, augments human technologists with virtual agents powered by artificial intelligence. It helps humans and machines reach their exponential potential in application services. The platform currently includes several intelligent virtual agents that use machine learning to collaborate with their human co-workers. The platform brings together various Accenture industry assets such as intelligent and analytics tools and methods, as well as tools from across the company's alliance partner ecosystem.