Financial services organisations that have adopted artificial intelligence (AI) expect to see a 41% improvement in competitiveness within three years, according to a new study by Microsoft Asia and IDC Asia-Pacific. More than half (52%) of the financial services organisations in Asia-Pacific have already started on their AI journeys. This is higher than the average of 41% for all industries, indicating the sector is more advanced than others in the region. The findings are contained in "Future Ready Business: Assessing Asia-Pacific's Growth with AI". "The digital economy has resulted in demands for organisations to reinvent themselves to remain relevant to their customers," said Connie Leung, senior director and financial services business lead with Microsoft Asia.

While Machine learning has been on the technology agenda now for as long as twenty years, it is only in more recent times that its potential benefits in field service management terms have been more widely understood. Machine learning is an offset of artificial intelligence (AI), whereby AI can learn to do a task without needing to be programmed by a human--the AI learns to do the task itself. There has been growing interest in AI in recent years, with technology leaders, including Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, utilising machine learning to enhance existing technology. The excitement for machine learning in service organisations has increased profusely, even though its powerful benefits are not completely understood by the masses yet. See also: Will man and machine join forces to defeat the threat of human error?