Robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) have traditionally been viewed as separate and somewhat unequal worlds--RPA proponents consider AI to be impractical, while AI enthusiasts deem RPA primitive--but these two fields are highly complementary. Think of them as the brawn and the brains of performance. Companies can gain quick wins through RPA while strategically introducing AI for sustainable benefits and continual optimization. Services are especially amenable to this approach. By services, we mean both service industries, such as banking, insurance, and telecommunications, as well as services provided by in-house support functions, such as finance, HR, and IT.

The AXELOS Best Practice Podcast – the essential (audio) guide to help you and your organizations create better outcomes while promoting best practice within IT service management (ITSM) and Programme and Project Management (PPM). Our two regular hosts, AXELOS’ ITSM Ambassador Akshay Anand and PPM Ambassador Allan Thomson, will speak to guests from a variety of backgrounds. They’ll share their insight, knowledge and opinion based on their own experiences and professional expertise. We’ll share a new episode with you twice a month. So, tune in and enjoy our podcast.

Here is the brief story of this evolution of self-service. Not that long-ago, shop clerks pulled merchandise for us from high shelves behind a counter. Today, we push squeaky, wheeled, metal baskets around the well-lit warehouses we call supermarkets. Innovation in retail shopping--as with all service businesses--happens through shifts in business processes and technologies. Automated self-service fuses process and technology so customers can serve themselves.

For some time now, 'experience' has been the buzz word that has been increasingly gaining prominence in most business sectors and the banking sector is no exception. Today, around the world, we see thought leaders saying - it is not the goods that are being marketed any more, it is personalised experiences. Back in 1998, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore authored an article titled'Welcome to the Experience Economy' that appeared in the Harward Business Review. The literature points out that the experience economy is the next economy that would follow the agrarian economy, the industrial economy, and the service economy. While the idea seemed ahead of its time back then, 20 plus years into the future, the idea perfectly describes the state of businesses today.

In building a case for an American manufacturing renaissance, economists cite increasing productivity, cheap natural gas, and rising value-added figures to show that manufacturing is in good shape and will get better. Some of these positivists also claim that rising labor costs in Asia and the creation of U.S. manufacturing jobs since 2010 are evidence of a big turnaround in manufacturing. There are also some mysterious predictions, shared without data to back them up, that manufacturing exports will grow and imports will shrink. Manufacturing has been battered so badly by China and other Asian countries and by American multinational corporation offshoring that people are desperate for positive news. But the question is, are these stories based on truth or are they just "happy talk"? For example, the McKinsey Global Institute says growth in manufacturing is right around the corner.

Sitting in the BMW dealership waiting for a flat to be replaced, I realize I've driven over 100 miles and spent five hours behind the wheel this week. In Phoenix, I am living the life this city has designed for me. A sprawling grid fueled by swooping highways and generous arterial roads, the Phoenix metropolitan area is a gargantuan expression of the car culture that defines the urban experience for most Americans. To use this space, you need a vehicle. Anything else effects your passive or active exclusion from a host of activities and, more broadly, from the culture itself.

Sitting in the BMW dealership waiting for a flat to be replaced, I realize I've driven over 100 miles and spent five hours behind the wheel this week. In Phoenix, I am living the life this city has designed for me. A sprawling grid fueled by swooping highways and generous arterial roads, the Phoenix metropolitan area is a gargantuan expression of the car culture that defines the urban experience for most Americans. To use this space, you need a vehicle. Anything else effects your passive or active exclusion from a host of activities and, more broadly, from the culture itself.

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 07, 2017 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- FinancialForce, the number one customer-centric ERP cloud vendor built on the Salesforce Platform, today announced it has experienced resounding success as a result of being all in on Salesforce Einstein. Since this revolutionary, integrated set of AI technologies was debuted by Salesforce at Dreamforce 2016, FinancialForce has successfully mastered its capabilities to not only run its company on the bleeding edge of Einstein, but also bring world-class analytics and predictive capabilities to its customers. The company is currently running its internal operations on an app it created, entitled Pulse. A product of Einstein Discovery technology, Pulse quickly and easily tracks massive amounts of FinancialForce data -- everything from customer support cases, usage metrics, opportunities, survey data, financial data, communities, sales invoices, transactional data and more. Leveraging Einstein Discovery across the collected data, FinancialForce is able to unearth critical insights that help deliver specific and specialized service to customers.

Robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) have traditionally been viewed as separate and somewhat unequal worlds--RPA proponents consider AI to be impractical, while AI enthusiasts deem RPA primitive--but these two fields are highly complementary. Think of them as the brawn and the brains of performance. Companies can gain quick wins through RPA while strategically introducing AI for sustainable benefits and continual optimization. Services are especially amenable to this approach. By services, we mean both service industries, such as banking, insurance, and telecommunications, as well as services provided by in-house support functions, such as finance, HR, and IT.

On Friday, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said he's "not worried at all" about artificial intelligence replacing human workers because it's "50-100 more years" off. In reality, data shows this is already happening -- with an estimated 38 percent of existing U.S. jobs at risk of being turned over to machines by 2030, according to research from PwC. Another study put out by the University of Oxford last year had similar estimates: The researchers found that 47 percent of US jobs were at risk of automation in the next two decades. But despite justified fears of obsolescence in the West, it is actually developing economies that are poised to be hit the hardest by fourth Industrial Revolution, or "Industry 4.0," where machines are networked together in "smart factories" that have little need for human input. This is already evident in China, where the domestic economy exploded in the last two decades thanks to Western companies that moved their manufacturing operations there.