This country has something of a love/hate relationship with government jobs. We hate that most government workers are guaranteed overtime and coffee breaks when not working strictly 9-5. But then who wouldn't love being well paid, with early retirement and congressional-level benefits for such effort. Thus, for those of us in the private sector it might seem a bit of career karma that a recent federal study finds automation can eliminate five percent of all government jobs and 30 percent of the work the remaining employees do. I'd like now to offer the perspective I've gained over three decades helping build an industry-leading company designing the information technology systems now automating those government jobs and workloads.

Google has backed a radical AI robot that could finally make the paperless office a reality. Ripcord, founded by ex-NASA and Apple employees, has developed a unique robotic digitization system, and today revealed a $25m funding round led by Google Ventures. It uses a combination of robotic scanners and AI to do everything from remove staples and scan images to automatically convert them into searchable text and upload them to a cloud server. Co-founded by former Apple and NASA employees, Ripcord makes a radical robotic digitization system that uses AI to do everything from removing staples to scanning and shredding. The firm's robots can scan everything from business cards to huge architectural drawings.

As the price-performance ratio of artificial intelligence improves, business software companies are building deep learning and other new tools into mainstream products, extending the reach of automation into once-human realms and giving people a powerful decision-support system. Salesforce.com Inc. said it would add an AI-based component called Einstein to its sales software. "The new offering is a set of online AI services designed to automate tasks, predict behavior and spotlight relevant information," the WSJ's Rachael King reports. Other companies from Microsoft Corp. to International Business Machines Corp. are investing heavily into the development of AI-powered platforms for business users. AI is taking off after years of promise, and the market is expected to grow to 16.5 billion in 2019 from 1.6 billion in 2015 with a compound-annual growth rate of 65.2%, the WSJ says.