We are in the midst of a Digital Transformation revolution. Businesses are digitizing and using more and more technology to evolve internal processes and the customer experience. Think about how your TV viewing, shopping, food shopping, and traveling have changed over the last few years – that's digital transformation. Nowhere is digital transformation more evident than in the marketing department of any organization. Today, everything marketing does is enabled by technology.

Established in 2017, Credgenics is a SaaS-based end-to-end debt recovery platform. Presently, over 50 lenders are using the platform, which includes seven banks with notable names like ICICI, Axis, and HDFC and more than 40 NBFCs, such as LoanTap, Drip Capital, Udaan, among others. In the last three years Credgenics has managed to grow MoM from 80–100 per cent. The startup has raised Series-A round funding, with Tanglin Venture Partners and Westbridge Capitals being the main contributors, with participation from the existing investor Accel Partners; the valuation has now reached to US$ 100 million. Credgenics has also on-boarded more than 2200 lawyers and collection-partners, apart from building a solid team of more than 150 enthusiasts and experts.

There can be no doubt that the ability of AI to create fake multi-media content that is utterly convincing to humans represents a real and present threat to society, says Tim Winchcomb, head of technology strategy in wireless and digital services at Cambridge Consultants. The democratisation of manipulation techniques means that YouTubers already aspire to Hollywood-grade visual effects, while malicious individuals across the world stand ready to weaponise their synthetic realities. Yet all is not lost industry players are stepping up to meet the deepfakes challenge, convinced that a collaborative response will allow technology, and ultimately society, to prevail. The term deepfakes is a construct of deep learning essentially multi-layered neural networks and fake, which of course refers to misleading and usually harmful content that purports to represent reality. It can be particularly terrifying that these bogus moving and still images, audio or written text can be created in real-time.

Consumers' choices of which restaurants to patronize are based not only on their food cravings but on whether they can meet the diners' desires for safety and convenience. The pandemic has led many customers to replace indoor dining experiences with takeout and delivery purchases instead, and many have been turning to digital tools like websites, mobile apps and scannable QR codes posted in restaurants' windows to help them easily place these orders. Eateries are looking to cater to this shifting consumer demand and to spare their staff from close customer contact that could increase employees' risk of catching the virus. These two motivations are driving restaurants to adopt various technologies to facilitate swift, remote customer interactions. Millennial and Generation Z diners appear particularly swayed by such tools, with 61 percent saying that the ability to pay digitally is a key factor in influencing their restaurant choice.

As technology becomes the catalyst for business strategy and transformation, the lines between business and technology functions are blurring and the expectations of IT are shifting, leading many organizations to reimagine the role of technology and rethink traditional operating models and organizational structures. This CIO Insider presents a new way for unifying business and technology objectives to help enable business and technology functions to more effectively collaborate, innovate, and cocreate new sources of value. As the pace, scale, and impact of technological innovation and disruption have exponentially escalated, technology has become a primary influence on business strategy, strategic choices, and value-creation models. Harnessing and managing these five forces--one of today's most pressing business issues--can be incompatible with IT's traditional role of ensuring operational excellence and executing technology-enabled business objectives. Historically, business and technology functions were separate, which often reduced cross-functional collaboration and led to siloed execution, delayed projects, and inflexible processes. Businesses often defined strategic objectives and developed separate supporting technology strategies.

As the popularity of artificial intelligence waxes and wanes, it feels like we are at a peak. Hardly a day goes by without an organization announcing "a pivot toward AI" or an aspiration to "become AI-driven." Banks and fintechs are using facial recognition to support know-your-customer guidelines; marketing companies are deploying unsupervised learning to capture new consumer insights; and retailers are experimenting with AI-fueled sentiment analysis, natural language processing, and gamification. A close examination of the activities undertaken by these organizations reveals that AI is mainly being used for tactical rather than strategic purposes -- in fact, finding a cohesive long-term AI strategic vision is rare. Even in well-funded companies, AI capabilities are mostly siloed or unevenly distributed.

Transformation may be the most frequently used word or concept in the entire insurance business today. It is commonly viewed as a program of significant changes to a business that is enabled by new technologies like analytics, robotics and the cloud. Typically, these tools replace or extend legacy systems with the goal of making operations more digitally enabled, agile and cost effective. The powerful technologies get all the hype, but their role is often overestimated. In fact, human and organizational factors are usually the most important in successful transformations, because without the right talent, culture and mindset, as well as the right operating model, transformation simply won't happen.

Gartner's Hype Cycle tracks emerging information technologies in their journey towards mainstream adoption. It is designed to help companies tell hype from viable business opportunity, and give an idea when that value may be realized. This year, artificial intelligence is one of the year's three megatrends in the 2017 Hype Cycle. Gartner is calling this class of AI technologies "AI Everywhere". Unsurprisingly, many of the technologies are already at the "Peak of Inflated Expectations". Machine learning and deep learning are at peak hype, and predicted to be 2-5 years away from mainstream adoption. Cognitive computing is also at peak hype, but up to 10 years away, while artificial general intelligence (AI with the'intelligence' of an average human being) is 10 years away and in early innovation phase. Commenting on the Cycle, Gartner research director Mike J. Walker predicts that AI technologies will be the most disruptive class of technologies in driving digital business forwards during the next 10 years.