The subject of AI has long been on the lips of business leaders. But rather than simply being a subject of aspirational keynotes, it has moved from theory to practice in businesses. Susana Duran is Vice President of Digital Experiences at Sage. The exponential boom in data means businesses have a huge opportunity on their hands to gain real-time, tailored insights to enhance business agility. However, they also risk being swamped by data if they don't embrace intelligent tech soon.

Let's face it: tracking time sucks. It's boring, demanding, and something we don't feel as productive as the work itself. We treat it like something we can skip or do poorly, right? Especially for professional services and agencies, time is money. In 2015, a study from AffinityLive estimated that the U.S. economy is losing around $7.4 billion a day due to employees bad time tracking.

Counting billable time in six-minute increments is the most annoying part of being a lawyer. It leads law firms to conservatively under-bill. And it leaves lawyers stuck manually filling out timesheets after a long day when they want to go home to their families. Life is already short, as Ping CEO and co-founder Ryan Alshak knows too well. The former lawyer spent years caring for his mother as she battled a brain tumor before her passing.

The big question the blockchain community is only just starting to answer is what will the governance issues look like in the new era? And when most things get to be a smart contract, will they be smart enough? To get an understanding of the future and the big picture, it's helpful to go back to the past when things were barely automated at all. Let's take a look at a worker back in the 70s. In those days, of punch card and cash, you could earn money by working on a car production line, for example.

This morning, just under a year later, Sadoun took the stage at the Publicis-founded VivaTech conference in Paris to unveil long-awaited details about Marcel, beyond the ad lingo boilerplate of transformation, innovation, and breaking down silos. There was still a lot of that, but also a walk-through of what the company is calling "Publicis in the palm of your hand." Built with the help of Microsoft AI and the company's own Publicis.Sapient, the new platform aims to connect all 80,000 Publicis employees, across 200 disciplines in 130 countries, to provide more seamless communication, collaboration, and anticipation of client needs. It's currently being beta-tested by 100 employees, moving to 1,000 in the next few weeks, and the idea is to start the overall rollout in January, with a goal of having 80% of the company's people connected by 2020. "When I announced this last year at Cannes, our industry was dancing, drinking, and having fun. But since then, a few things have happened," says Sadoun, in a conversation with Fast Company before the VivaTech presentation.

If the use of artificial intelligence in building top customer experiences has been well documented, its use in developing top employee experiences has, to a large extent, been overlooked. However, with the leadership in many organization beginning to realize that better employee experiences result in better customer engagement with the organization, they are now starting to look at their employee experiences and how to improve it. One of the lines of reasoning at the moment is that if AI can improve customer experiences, and customer experience and employee experiences are closely linked, why not use AI to improve employee experiences as well. It's an argument that has not been missed by the likes of LinkedIn. Recently, the San Francisco based LinkedIn announced the creation of the LinkedIn AI Academy.

Hands up if your resourcing team sends you a timesheet meme each week? The internet is awash with timesheet memes that are regularly downloaded by frazzled HR staff, at their wits end trying to compel employees to do. And it's only one mundane task of many that take up valuable time and contribute to the slow torturous drip that is administration. If only there was a way to legitimately do less of it and concentrate on the good stuff. It's pretty well established, if not universally adopted, that chatbots can enhance customer service experiences.

If you need to do a job more than once then automate it – or so the wisdom goes. And now the growing availability of intelligent, automated software – or bots – is making automation a reality for businesses of all sizes. Bots are now undertaking much of the drudgery of business life – filling in forms, answering customer queries, compiling data and handling social media tasks. Proponents say this liberates staff to work on more creative and engaging work; bots are a new, cheap resource to be exploited. But is there a human cost and just how much should we expect from these new minion workers?

If you need to do a job more than once then automate it – or so the wisdom goes. And now the growing availability of intelligent, automated software – or bots – is making automation a reality for businesses of all sizes. Bots are now undertaking much of the drudgery of business life – filling in forms, answering customer queries, compiling data and handling social media tasks. Proponents say this liberates staff to work on more creative and engaging work; bots are a new, cheap resource to be exploited. But is there a human cost and just how much should we expect from these new minion workers?