Recent years have seen the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) adoption in the marketing and media industries. While often a buzzword for marketers to make their work sound more exciting, the real benefits to brands center on the use of machines to carry out deep learning and make humans' jobs easier. AI is certainly growing in notoriety, with up to 85% of UK businesses said to be set to invest in the field by 2020. In addition, studies have shown the gradual uptake of soft robotics in the home – 23-32% of households in the US and 18% of households in the UK have at least one voice assistant, the most popular models being either Amazon's Alexa or Google Assistant. Moreover, Apple claimed in 2018 that a staggering 500 million of its users now frequently make use of Siri, its pre-installed voice assistant.

If you want to make money in finance, you are probably pursuing'alpha.' But alpha generation is not easy: it requires time series forecasting. It also requires that your (hopefully good) forecasts are turned into profits - and this is where things can get complicated. When you work on the buy-side in finance, you can realize alpha either by placing orders and trading (aggressing) or by slightly modifying – skewing – the prices that you are quoting to others (known as passive risk management, as opposed to aggressive trading). In each case you leak some information about your forecast to the market – and therefore interact with the very object that you are trying to predict.

In a world where digital tools support virtually every part of our lives, why is it that the full power of such tools has yet to be unleashed to those who might benefit most - educators and learners? In the latest of its series of publications concerning digital learning, Intelligence Unleashed: An Argument for AI in Education, Pearson, in collaboration with the UCL Knowledge Lab, maps out how artificial intelligence in education (AIEd) can be used to create learning tools that are more efficient, flexible and inclusive than those currently available; tools that will help learners prepare for an economy that is swiftly being reshaped by digital technologies. The authors, led by Professor Rose Luckin of the UCL Knowledge Lab, highlight existing and emergent technology that could be leveraged to address some of the most intractable issues in education, including achievement gaps. For example, technology available today could be applied to support student learning at a scale previously unimaginable by providing one-on-one tutoring to every student, in every subject. Existing technologies also have the capacity to provide intelligent support to learners working in a group, and to create authentic virtual learning environments where students have the right support, at the right time, to tackle real-life problems and puzzles.