Chatter about artificial intelligence mostly falls into three basic categories: anxious uncertainty (will it take our jobs?); In this hazy, liminal, pre-disruption moment, there is little consensus as to whether generative AI is a tool or a threat, and few rules for using it properly. For students, this uncertainty feels especially profound. Bans on AI and claims that using it constitutes cheating are now giving way to concerns that AI use is inevitable and probably should be taught in school. Now, as a new college admissions season kicks into gear, many prospective applicants are wondering: can AI write my personal essay?

Microsoft plans to make OpenAI's generative AI technology such as ChatGPT available to billions of users by integrating it into all of its products, CEO Satya Nadella said this week. That means that ChatGPT's ability to generate text through short prompts is likely on its way to the Office 365 product suite, including Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. Using OpenAI's models, Microsoft Word's autocomplete and autocorrect features could carry out more advanced tasks than style and grammar correction and generate longer chunks of text based on a few words. Though the company hasn't announced any specific features yet, users could potentially be able to input prompts and generate complete PowerPoint presentations and emails. These kinds of features could help Microsoft attract younger users. While Microsoft Office 365 has been a de facto standard for millions of enterprises, analysts say the tech giant has fallen behind in attracting those who gravitate toward collaborative-first products like Google Docs and Sheets.

In recent years, advances in neural networks and deep learning have triggered a revolution in artificial intelligence. The AI industry has made huge progress in solving complicated problems such as predicting cancer and driving cars. But AI also faces various challenges. Today artificial intelligence is in the greatest hype cycle of its history and has become the subject of a mixed jumble of hype, excitement, fear and resentment. Many of these challenges are at least partly because of a wrong perception toward AI.

If you define AI as something that can emulate human decision-making, there's a chance you'll be disappointed when you find out how limited AI solutions for cyber security really are. Speaking to Information Age ahead of his keynote speech at Custodian's Talking Tech, April 25 2019, Etienne Greeff, CTO and founder of SecureData, admitted that he often rolls his eyes when he hears about AI solutions for cyber security. He argued: "In cyber security and in application security, there's actually no known application of AI. There's no autonomous agent that automatically defines threats; that does not happen yet, and it's not very close to happening." It appears some enterprises are challenging the hype too.

Artificial intelligence (AI) may sound like science fiction, but it is real, and becoming increasingly important to companies in every sector. The field of artificial intelligence has produced a wide variety of "cognitive technologies" that simulate human reasoning and perceptual skills, giving businesses entirely new capabilities and enabling organizations to break prevailing tradeoffs between speed, cost, and quality. Aimed at a general business audience, this course demystifies artificial intelligence, provides an overview of a wide range of cognitive technologies, and offers a framework to help you understand their business implications. Some experts have called artificial intelligence "more important than anything since the industrial revolution." That makes this course essential for professionals working in business, operations, strategy, IT, and other disciplines.

How could the NHS look in another 30 years time? Will new technology and medical advances transform how we're looked after? We asked nine different corners of the health service - and the health secretary - what innovations we might see. Innovations that were unthinkable only a few decades or years ago are now common practice. Advances in medicine and technology, such as robot-assisted surgery and artificial intelligence, will have a significant impact on the delivery of surgical care in the future.

But increasingly, they can do things only humans were able to do. It is now possible to automate tasks that require human perceptual skills, such as recognizing handwriting or identifying faces, and those that require cognitive skills, such as planning, reasoning from partial or uncertain information, and learning. Technologies able to perform tasks such as these, traditionally assumed to require human intelligence, are known as cognitive technologies.1 Want to learn more about cognitive technologies? A product of the field of research known as artificial intelligence, cognitive technologies have been evolving over decades. Businesses are taking a new look at them because some have improved dramatically in recent years, with impressive gains in computer vision, natural language processing, speech recognition, and robotics, among other areas. Because cognitive technologies extend the power of information technology to tasks traditionally performed by humans, they have the potential to enable organizations to break prevailing tradeoffs between speed, cost, and quality. We know this first hand: The authors of this article have been aggressively experimenting with cognitive technologies in our own business and deploying multiple solutions based on them with great effect. And our colleagues are working with numerous clients to apply these technologies to diverse business challenges. Over the next five years we expect the impact of cognitive technologies on organizations to grow substantially.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is all around us. Unlike the Terminator robots, AI exists in subtle ways, embedded in our daily activities thanks to the rise of big data and machine learning. When Facebook tries to connect users with new friends or businesses, Netflix suggests a new TV series to watch, or Amazon recommends a book, these are all examples of AI presented to people via machine learning – a statistical method that finds patterns and makes predictions based on vast volumes of data. After years of hype, most organisations now have a solid understanding of the potential of big data. In fact, the majority of them are actively pursuing means to capitalise on all the information they capture.

The bot land grab is officially under way and everyone is rushing to recreate successful app ideas in chat interfaces. Somehow the old pitch by analogy -- we're "AirBnB for pets" -- has found a way to be even less original. Now any aspiring entrepreneur need only take the name of a successful app and add "as a chatbot" at the end. Of course, this is nothing new. The exact same thing happened at the start of the mobile revolution.

Google's AlphaGo beat a world champion Go player, a driverless truck completed its first commercial delivery (a 143-mile beer run!) and Microsoft researchers claimed to reach human parity in conversational speech recognition. It was also a year of stumbles, massive hype and painful failures such as Microsoft's chatbot Tay, which learned from the people it interacted with on Twitter, thereby morphing into a racist, hate-spewing embarrassment in less than 24 hours. And, lest we forget, Facebook was widely panned for (and is now taking some steps to address) its laissez-faire attitude about propagating fake news and the possibility that this may have affected the outcome of the presidential election. Taken together, these stories contain the seeds of the major trends I'll be following this year. You're going to see a lot more "Oooh! Shiny!" examples of AI in 2017, and people will send you links to news stories asking why you haven't implemented them yet.