When I was young, I was in the car with my dad and best friend, driving from Johannesburg to Durban. I remember we were talking in the back seat when my friend said he is sad that everything has already been invented. My dad immediately responded, "You can't think like that", and proceeded to explain to us that people who thought like never had any ideas. At the start of LSD, which was early 2000, we installed Linux. That was it, just Linux.

As time passes by, technology continues to evolve at an astonishing rate. This has been partly driven by the past few years due to the pandemic, which pushed organisations to adopt new technology and digitally transform at a faster rate, much faster than anyone thought possible within that frame of time. At this height of innovation, the constant galloping acceleration of technology is unrestrained. You might be asking yourself whether all these new developments are actually making life easier or making it more complex, especially as each year there's a constant stream of new features or functions produced by companies making it hard to stay on top of the new technology. It's fine to admit that it can be confusing to comprehend the purpose of the new technology and what it does.

The industry may be emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic, with e-commerce still thriving on it, but the supply chain crisis isn't going away. Infrastructure designed in a predictable pre-pandemic world isn't enough to clear the backlogs, and may even be making a bad situation worse. Could artificial intelligence (AI) be the technology that gets things moving again? Organisations certainly believe so, according to a new 3Gem report for Blue Yonder, which finds that more than half (53%) of UK supply chain decision-makers believe AI advances are key to managing disruption. This confidence in AI owes much to its promise of visibility.

AIOps refers to the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in IT management. It's a growing practice with large enterprises that's set to increase by 50% in 2021, according to Forrester VP and principal analyst Mike Gualtieri. The global market for AIOps is set to grow to $1.1 billion by 2024, according to research foundation Omdia. However, its adoption isn't likely to be uniform across all verticals. Omida's chief analyst, Roy Illsley, suggests healthcare, media, and entertainment are the main sectors leading the way, with energy and professional services also predicted to adopt at a slower pace.

Researchers from CeADAR, Ireland's national centre for Applied Data Analytics & AI, have developed a system which uses artificial intelligence to accurately predict the amount of renewable energy that will be produced at wind farms. The new tool, FREMI (Forecasting Renewable Energy with Machine Intelligence) is a collaborative project between CeADAR and SSE Airtricity. The €370,000 project took 18 months to complete and was funded by the SEAI National Energy Research Development and Demonstration (RD&D) programme. FREMI is accurate, scalable, reliable, and maintainable, and has already been deployed 21 SSE Airtricity wind farms around Ireland which are owned and operated by its sister company, SSE Renewables. FREMI will also allow energy traders to comply with new market rules imposed by the Integrated Single Electricity Market (ISEM), the wholesale electricity market for the island of Ireland.

As hard as it is for data scientists to tag data and develop accurate machine learning models, managing models in production can be even more daunting. Recognising model drift, retraining models with updating data sets, improving performance, and maintaining the underlying technology platforms are all important data science practices. Without these disciplines, models can produce erroneous results that significantly impact business. Developing production-ready models is no easy feat. According to one machine learning study, 55% of companies had not deployed models into production, and 40% or more require more than 30 days to deploy one model.

Huawei has launched a South African-based Cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Innovation Centre to drive innovation, knowledge transfer and economic growth through app development in the AI industry. The announcement was made by Ray Rui, president of Huawei Cloud Africa region, during the Huawei Cloud Summit Africa 2020, an online event to unpack the opportunities of cloud computing for African business under the theme "Building an Intelligent Africa". "AI will be critical to social evolution and industrial growth in future," said Rui. "We also believe that when you grow economic opportunities, everyone benefits. For this reason, we are opening the Huawei Cloud & AI Innovation Centre to application developers across all economic sectors." The new centre will be based at Huawei's South African headquarters in Woodmead, Johannesburg, but developers across Africa will be able to access the centre remotely. It will teach AI application best practice, link developers to markets, support AI supply chains, develop talent and support application innovation.

Organisations across the world are still finding it tough to scale artificial intelligence projects throughout their entire enterprise, according to research by Capgemini. A new report by the systems integrator revealed that only 13% of companies have rolled out multiple artificial intelligence applications across numerous teams. Almost three-quarters of organisations, which encompass 950 firms with at least one billion dollars in annual revenue, have been unable to deploy a single application if they started before 2019. However, the report showed some promise for organisations who were just kicking off their AI initiatives, with those moving beyond AI pilots and proof of concepts increasing from 36% to 53% since the SI's last report in 2017. Around 13% of those featured had reached at-scale status, rolling out multiple AI applications across numerous teams.

The graph represents a network of 2,185 Twitter users whose tweets in the requested range contained "#cloudcomputing", or who were replied to or mentioned in those tweets. The network was obtained from the NodeXL Graph Server on Monday, 17 February 2020 at 14:42 UTC. The requested start date was Monday, 17 February 2020 at 01:01 UTC and the maximum number of days (going backward) was 14. The maximum number of tweets collected was 5,000. The tweets in the network were tweeted over the 2-day, 0-hour, 29-minute period from Thursday, 13 February 2020 at 12:00 UTC to Saturday, 15 February 2020 at 12:30 UTC.

Gartner says artificial intelligence is expected to be common in the office by 2025, already seeing'huge pent-up demand' Artificial intelligence (AI) will be widely adopted in office environments in a variety of ways over the next few years as businesses invest in digital workplace initiatives, Gartner analysts have said. The trend is expected to gather steam as voice-activated personal assistants that have proved a hit at home begin to make inroads in the office. By 2025, the technology will "certainly be mainstream," said Matthew Cain, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner – even though privacy and security concerns have limited deployments so far. Cain was among the analysts who spoke at Gartner's Digital Workplace Summit in London. Gartner has separately predicted that consumer and business spending on smart speakers will pass $3.5 billion (€3.15 billion) in 2021, with 25% of digital workers using an AI assistant on a daily basis within the next two years.