Myra and Gia were godsend. If tourists start booking Shimla holidays to enjoy the snow and traffic outstrips the number of rooms, the duo sends alerts to hotel chains in the region to increase online inventory. They forecast demand, answer customer queries and can even update on flight delays. The duo has been at the travel portal's headquarters in Cyber City, Gurgaon, for just a year but has already moved on to solving more difficult tasks such as managing loyalty programmes. Whether cancellations or refunds from 12,000-15,000 customer interactions every day, about 60% are resolved by the duo and some of their other techsavvy mates.

LONDON (Reuters) – Softbank's Vision Fund plans to pump more money into insurance, a sector it sees as both ripe for disruption and a potential booster for its bigger bets in cars, health and financial services, a Vision Fund executive told Reuters. In the past year, the world's biggest private technology investor has backed China's largest online insurer ZhongAn 6060.HK as well as PolicyBazaar, India's biggest online insurance distributor, and app-based U.S. home insurer Lemonade. And these and other insurance bets totaling nearly $3 billion are just the start, Vision Fund dealmaker David Thevenon said. The Vision Fund has raised nearly $100 billion, almost half of it from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund. "We believe that technology and how data is used, processed and collected is going to transform insurance," Thevenon said.

LONDON (Reuters) - Softbank's Vision Fund plans to pump more money into insurance, a sector it sees as both ripe for disruption and a potential booster for its bigger bets in cars, health and financial services, a Vision Fund executive told Reuters. In the past year, the world's biggest private technology investor has backed China's largest online insurer ZhongAn (6060.HK) as well as PolicyBazaar, India's biggest online insurance distributor, and app-based U.S. home insurer Lemonade. And these and other insurance bets totaling nearly $3 billion are just the start, Vision Fund dealmaker David Thevenon said. The Vision Fund has raised nearly $100 billion, almost half of it from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund. "We believe that technology and how data is used, processed and collected is going to transform insurance," Thevenon said.

Artificial intelligence (AI) can generate X-ray reports at Max Healthcare. This evolving tool -- in beta stage at present -- is being programmed with radiologists' knowhow, by scanning millions of patient records. And though it may not yet be able to read the blur on the film as tuberculosis, in five years, AI could make that interpretation as well. HDFC Bank products such as'loan in 10 seconds' are processed by machines. At travel platform Ixigo, bots handle most queries without people realising.