"Now I have enabled the accent translation," he says. It's the same person, but he sounds completely different: loud and slightly nasal, impossible to distinguish from the accents of my friends in Brooklyn. Only after he had spoken a few more sentences did I notice a hint of the software changing his voice: it rendered the word "technology" with an unnatural cadence and stress on the wrong syllable. Still, it was hard not to be impressed – and disturbed. The man calling me was a product manager from Sanas, a Silicon Valley startup that's building real-time voice-altering technology that aims to help call center workers around the world sound like westerners.

"Now I have enabled the accent translation," he says. It's the same person, but he sounds completely different: loud and slightly nasal, impossible to distinguish from the accents of my friends in Brooklyn. Only after he had spoken a few more sentences did I notice a hint of the software changing his voice: it rendered the word "technology" with an unnatural cadence and stress on the wrong syllable. Still, it was hard not to be impressed – and disturbed. The man calling me was a product manager from Sanas, a Silicon Valley startup that's building real-time voice-altering technology that aims to help call center workers around the world sound like westerners.

Landlords have long complained that red tape prevents them from accepting federal housing vouchers, limiting the places that low-income tenants can live. Those in wealthier, whiter neighborhoods tend to turn voucher-holders away, driving segregation. One bureaucratic slowdown that has particularly frustrated landlords is how long it can take for inspectors from DHA, Dallas' public housing authority, to certify that an apartment meets quality standards. This process can stretch on for weeks -- the agency manages more than 17,000 units across seven counties -- during which time the apartments sit empty. "For them, vacancies are money. Instead of continuing to stick our heads in the sand ... we have to figure this out differently," said the authority's CEO, Troy Broussard.

Indian philanthropist, cardiac surgeon and founder of Narayana Hrudayalaya, Devi Prasad Shetty pioneered the running of hospitals like a mix of Wal-Mart and a low-cost airline that resulted in the chain of'no-frills' Narayana Hrudayalaya clinics in southern India. Rapid advances in technology are promising to transform the service sector in much the same way as the industrial revolution in the 18th century reshaped manufacturing. As technologies become smarter, smaller, cheaper and more sophisticated there are few services that will not be affected. Developments in areas such as mobile technology, wearables, robotics, virtual reality, speech recognition and artificial intelligence will bring opportunities for a wide range of service innovations that have the potential to dramatically improve the customer experience, service quality and productivity all at the same time. Self-driving cars, drone-delivery and largely robot-staffed hotels and restaurants are only the beginning of this revolution, with new technologies creating opportunities for firms to become both cost-leaders and service-leaders in their respective industries.

Narayana develops AI applications that can cut down customer problem resolution by a factor of 10. This is what I heard and saw from Bejoy Narayana, CEO of BoodsKapper, at the recent SAP Financial Services Innovation Summit held at the SAP Leonardo Center in New York. The Texas-based startup develops AI applications on SAP Cloud Platform designed to not only ferret out what customers want quickly, but also communicate in their preferred medium – using any texting app or moving to a telephone conversation. "No one likes calling customer service, and we believe that experience can be much better by training the software to behave like the ideal customer service representative, getting to the point quickly to provide a solution for busy people," said Narayana. "Modeling the actions of a company's best customer agent, we can train the AI engine to be up and running in weeks just as you would a new employee. This can cut down interaction times by a factor of ten."