When Jahanzaib Ansari was looking for work in 2016, his resume was not the problem. Despite a CV boasting experience as a programmer and attending the University of Toronto, Ansari's job search soon hit a dead end. At the suggestion of a friend, he changed his first name on his resume and saw almost immediate results. "I wouldn't hear back from employers until my [colleague] said, 'Why don't you just Anglicize it?' I went with variations of Jason, Jordan, Jacob, and literally in four to six weeks, I got a job," says the CEO of Knockri, a technology firm that created an artificial intelligence tool that aims to reduce bias in the hiring process.

Touch a penny to a live electrical plug: that's what Alexa told a 10-year-old child who asked it for a challenge to do. Amazon's virtual assistant made the headlines in a bad way last month after reportedly scraping this'challenge' off TikTok and regurgitating it wholesale. Alexa's gaffe recalls Microsoft's Tay chatbot, which had to be taken down in 2016 after learning to swear and spew extremist ideology from Twitter. Almost six years separate the two incidents, and machine learning should have long since advanced beyond returning such wildly inappropriate responses. It's an important consideration now that AI has become the foundation of multiple workplace tools, especially recruitment and retention.

The adoption of artificial intelligence in the workplace was greatly accelerated by the pandemic, and as we inch back toward the office setting, these tools are only expected to grow in value. Fifty-six percent of companies improved their relationship with AI during 2021, up 45% from 2020, according to a recent survey conducted by consulting firm, McKinsey. Within the world of HR, recruiting and hiring have seen a particular uptick when it comes to embracing AI tools. "The traditional 9-to-5 culture is gone forever," says Sunny Saurabh, CEO at AI recruiting platform, Interviewer.AI. "A lot of the workforce is going to go remote in the next three to four years and some of the biggest challenges that we'll find in remote settings is collaboration and how to bring in productivity. In some worlds it was only thought possible in a face-to-face setup -- but now you're seeing a lot of AI tools come in and take over that space."

Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure are the leading cloud providers by a long shot. Though late to the party, GCP has seen robust growth over the years. Google Cloud's revenue jumped nearly 46 percent year-on-year to $4.04 billion in the first quarter of 2021. "All vendors offer strong ML services and functionalities, but this is where GCP stands out as their years of search engine expertise, and research come into play," said Diwakar Chittora, Founder & CEO, IntelliPaat. Here is how GCP offers more benefits than AWS, Azure. TPUs are Google's custom-developed application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) to accelerate ML workloads.

Even as AI technology transforms some aspects of cybersecurity, the intersection of the two remains profoundly human. Although it's perhaps counterintuitive, humans are front and center in all parts of the cybersecurity triad: the bad actors who seek to do harm, the gullible soft targets, and the good actors who fight back. Even without the looming specter of AI, the cybersecurity battlefield is often opaque to average users and the technologically savvy alike. Adding a layer of AI, which comprises numerous technologies that can also feel unexplainable to most people, may seem doubly intractable -- as well as impersonal. That's because although the cybersecurity fight is sometimes deeply personal, it's rarely waged in person.

Curie Labs, an energy analytics startup, uses sensors, cloud computation, controllers and AI to cut power consumption in large facilities by 25 percent. Last Diwali, Saurabh Vij and Abhinav Saksena were appalled to see the levels of pollution recorded in Delhi and the country at large. The duo are friends from IIT Delhi. Abhinav comes from a core technical background while Saurabh had earlier founded a startup GTI Labs. Discussing the pollution problem, they soon realised that one unit of power consumption leads to close to 0.5 kilogram of carbon emissions.