The use of artificial intelligence technology in banking has great potential, much of it still untapped. It's use in powering chatbots and digital assistants using natural language processing is of the best-known AI applications. AI can also be used as part of data analytics, helping banks and credit unions detect fraud more quickly on the one hand and create more personalized customer messaging and offers on the other. Significantly, AI can help make institutions -- bank and nonbank -- make faster lending decisions. However, there is downside to the use of artificial intelligence, the consequences of which loom ominously for banks and credit unions.

We often think of artificial intelligence (AI) as a futuristic concept. But the birth of AI as a viable subject for computing applications is usually traced to a project at Dartmouth College in 1956. Years later, AI-driven computers were beating humans in chess and solving word problems in algebra. In other words, AI has been around for a while. But for businesses, adoption came slowly. AI spent most of the past decade as a buzzword for strategy conversations before companies really began to unleash its possibilities as a benefit to customers and employees.

Not all disruptive technologies give you results. They are in different stages of maturity and consulting firm KPMG has made an effort to bucket them in terms of investment and their impact. Its research paper'Imagine a new connected world' released in association with India Mobile Congress and COAI traces the next wave of growth in telecommunications and technology in India. Eight major disruptive technologies are bracketed into four - Table stakes, Strategic, Maturing and Nascent. The Table stakes are about technologies that "receive high investment and generate a strong impact today. They have reached an initial phase of business maturity but remain vigorously innovative and challenging to master".

BMO Capital Markets is a trade name used by BMO Financial Group for the wholesale banking businesses of Bank of Montreal, BMO Harris Bank N.A. (member FDIC), Bank of Montreal Europe p.l.c, and Bank of Montreal (China) Co. Ltd and the institutional broker dealer businesses of BMO Capital Markets Corp.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning has become essential if you are selling sales, customer service and marketing software, especially in large enterprises. The biggest vendors from Adobe to Salesforce to Microsoft to Oracle are jockeying for position to bring automation and intelligence to these areas. Just today, Oracle announced several new AI features in its sales tools suite and Salesforce did the same in its customer service cloud. Both companies are building on artificial intelligence underpinnings that have been in place for several years. All of these companies want to help their customers achieve their business goals by using increasing levels of automation and intelligence.

Ahead of its Build conference, Microsoft today released a slew of new machine learning products and tweaks to some of its existing services. These range from no-code tools to hosted notebooks, with a number of new APIs and other services in-between. The core theme, here, though, is that Microsoft is continuing its strategy of democratizing access to AI. Ahead of the release, I sat down with Microsoft's Eric Boyd, the company's corporate vice president of its AI platform, to discuss Microsoft's take on this space, where it competes heavily with the likes of Google and AWS, as well as numerous, often more specialized startups. And to some degree, the actual machine learning technologies have become table stakes. Everybody now offers pre-trained models, open-source tools and the platforms to train, build and deploy models.

For the past eight years, Uber's chief executive officer and co-founder Travis Kalanick played the role of disruptive entrepreneur with wild abandon--and to great effect. The company has revolutionized ground transportation in many of the world's cities, often ignoring existing regulations, the concerns of entrenched taxi companies and many of its own drivers, and commonly accepted levels of decency in the workplace. Now Kalanick has been ousted, and his successor will be forced to stick to a much more predictable script. Uber's next CEO will have his or her hands full with important blocking and tackling, such as repairing relations with drivers, filling key executive positions, and leading a wholesale makeover of the company's hard-edged culture. "Travis has forced the board's hand," says long-time technology consultant and author Geoffrey Moore.