Anyone with even the slightest interest in technology would have witnessed the frenzy following the launch of ChatGPT last November. For many, it illustrated the first step towards the golden age of Artificial Intelligence (AI) integration into our everyday lives; revolutionising the way in which we conceptualise and interact with technology. Intelligent automation has quietly, but nonetheless irreversibly, become a mainstay for many of the services and industries we use daily. Automation in financial services is one such example. From JPMorgan using bots to respond to internal IT requests, including resetting employee passwords, to Barclays introducing robotics process automation (RPA) across a range of processes, such as accounts receivable and fraudulent account closure, a wave of automation has emerged which redefined the way our industry operates.

Artificial intelligence is undoubtedly making our lives easier in enormous ways. Artificial Intelligence is coming out as an industry analysis that improves the overall business operation and enhances each customer's experiences. These are the emerging technologies that serve a wide area network and somehow emphasize the creation of the intelligent machines that react accordingly and accelerate future growth. Many leading Artificial intelligence solution providers are coming out as the best-in-class services that easily attract the attention of millions. In 2020, more organizations will adopt digital intelligence technologies into their overarching digital transformation initiatives, as enterprises realize that these Artificial Intelligence Solution Providers illuminate paths to improved customer experience, reduce operating costs and sharpen competitive advantage.

In the year that Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey turns 50, you could be forgiven for asking where is the space-age future we were promised? Many still choose to travel to meetings in favour of using videophones and we don't have a permanent colony on the Moon, let alone Jupiter. Teleconferencing technology is improving though as just a few weeks ago Canadian researchers unveiled the TeleHuman 2, a 3D holographic projection system that smacks of the Star Trek holodeck. The system is based on a ring of intelligent projectors mounted above and around a reflective, human-sized cylindrical pod. The display projects a light field composed of many images, one for every degree of angle, so users need not wear a headset or 3D glasses to see each other.

Over the next three years, embedded artificial intelligence (AI) will dramatically reshape the customer experience across nearly all industries, with most major businesses providing some type of AI-centred customer experience. Today, 43% of businesses are already leveraging some form of AI, according to Aberdeen Research. AI is a way of providing new, novel experiences that are useful and helpful to people. "By 2021, most major businesses will provide some type of customer experience centred around AI," confirmed Jerry Overton, DXC fellow and head of Artificial Intelligence at DXC Technology, in a recent blog post. Businesses exploring how best to take advantage of AI must focus on customers' needs.

While governments around the world are wrestling with the potential for massive on-rushing technological disruption of work and the jobs market, few are extending the telescope to explore what the knock-on impacts might be for the planet. Here we explore some dimensions of the issue. Although replacing humans with robots has a dystopian flavor, what, if any positives are there from successive waves of artificial intelligence (AI) and other exponentially developing technologies displacing jobs ranging from banker to construction worker? Clearly, the number of people working and the implications for commuting, conduct of their role and their resulting income-related domestic lifestyle all have a direct bearing on their consumption of resources and emissions footprint. However, while everyone wants to know the impact of smart automation, the reality is that we are all clueless as to the outcome over the next twenty years, as this fourth industrial revolution has only just started.

Sophie Guibaud, Fidor Bank: AI is on! Implementation of first uses cases around real-time contextual added-value banking notifications and offers will make their appearance in 2018, predicts Sophie Guibaud, vice-president for European expansion at Fidor Bank. Artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to make some real inroads into the consumer banking experience. While some might have dismissed it as a gimmick a year ago, there's no doubt that AI is going to used more and more by banks into 2018. What's more, it won't just be used in the customer-facing services at the front end, but at the back end too, helping banks to make better use of the data they have.