In the era of disruption, the largest, incumbent organisations need to innovate and take advantage of the growing global partner ecosystem. Instead of running away from the innovators, the traditional enterprise must turn and fight, by taking advantage of the different technologies in the marketplace. In one way, this can be achieved by building out a solid technology or IT team, whose work is stitched into the fabric of the business. But, every business needs a partner -- it's unwise to go it alone, especially if you're not an expert in a specific field. Below, Information Age identifies in three parts, three Silicon Valley AI startups that can help your business seize the advantage of technology and avoid disruption in the digital era.

A new AI-based data "navigation" system is billed as the first analytics platform to use natural language processing to generate SQL queries from spoken requests. The result is a sort of virtual assistant for data analysts. Promethium, a data management startup based in Menlo Park, Calif., said this week its NLP-generated SQL queries can be used to assemble data across different systems and platforms. The navigation system is based on the company's AI and machine learning-driven contextual automation tool. The software can be used to locate data, then present it in form that is most useful to business analysts.