More than 30% said their companies have allocated $50 million or more to smart automation projects, and more than half have already spent at least $10 million; the initiatives include various combinations of robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence, machine learning, cognitive computing and analytics; highest expenditure levels were for the finance and accounting category, marked by 23% of respondents as receiving investment of slightly more than US$50 million; the technology that organizations are experimenting with or piloting the most is AI (36); 30% of companies are opting not to invest or are unsure of their plans for smart automation (KPMG Easing the Pressure Points). Lawyers surveyed think AI will be valuable for tracking billable time (53% of US layers, 49% of UK lawyers), conflicts clearance (43% and 41%), and compliance with client billing documents (34% for both US and UK lawyers) (Intapp survey reveals lawyers' attitudes toward technology). The portion of auto companies not using or testing AI rose to 39% in 2019 from 26% in 2017 (Capgemini). "The accelerated growth of RPA is being driven by high levels of efficiency and productivity that can now be achieved from intelligent automation, which combines advanced RPA, artificial intelligence and embedded analytics. The demand for RPA solutions has surged as legacy companies are now competing with'digital native' companies like Amazon and Uber, in which nearly every part of the business is completely automated"--Mihir Shukla, CEO of Automation Anywhere Inc., an RPA maker that expects to deploy three million software robots at organizations worldwide by 2020, a 200% increase from today (Wall Street Journal).

Turing Award winners (from left to right) Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun, and Geoffrey Hinton at the ReWork Deep Learning Summit, Montreal, October 2017. AI "Sputnik moment" (say it in Chinese*) is at hand China is overtaking the US not just in the sheer volume of AI research papers submitted and published, but also in the production of high-impact papers as measured by the top 50%, top 10%, and top 1% most-cited papers. "By projecting current trends, we see that China is likely to have more top-10% papers by 2020 and more top-1% papers by 2025" (Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence). Cisco attributes the decline to their increased confidence that "migrating to the cloud will improve protection efforts, while apparently decreasing reliance on less proven technologies such as artificial intelligence" (Cisco). Nearly 90% of IT leaders see their use of AI/ML increasing in the future and 41% look for technology that is powered by AI, a top factor in their purchasing decisions.