Americans pulling into a Starbucks drive thru might think they are being served by a friendly staff member. But at some locations, the voice listening to the order is actually an AI robot. Behind the counter inside the store, baristas can lean on a virtual personal assistant to recall recipes or manage schedules. In the back of the shop, a scanning tool has taken on the painstaking process of counting the inventory, relieving staff of one of retail's most tedious chores, in a bid to fix the out-of-stock gaps that have frustrated the firm. The new technology is part of the hundreds of millions of dollars the 55-year-old coffee giant has been investing as it tries to win back customers after several years of struggling sales.

A vast majority of the populations in the emerging markets of Southeast Asia, Latin America, and India are at the cusp of financial inclusion, thanks to the growing availability and adoption of digital lending services. The fintech-as-a-service market is predicted to grow to around US$ 949 Billion by 2028 due to the popularity of the alternative payment solution Buy Now Pay Later in these markets. With increased acceptability for digital lending in segments that had never been a part of the financial mainstream, organizations must enhance risk decisioning while ensuring faster turnaround on credit applications. Maintaining a high rate of credit approvals and managing risk while lending to people with little credit information is a challenge that more and more financial institutions are looking to solve by leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence. Fintech companies are automating these processes by enriching their machine learning techniques with data and scores that improve predictive risk modeling.

For the past several years, there's been ample publicity about the tremendous impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on radiology, from timesaving efficiencies to resource allocations.1 Of course, patients may not see the backend gears turn as machines pore through behemoth volumes of scans and data for their ultimate benefit, but they do see positive changes on the front-end. And they can see--as much as clinicians or administrators do--that the technology could make a significant and meaningful difference in their lives. Consumers understand the potentially beneficial impact of AI in healthcare; according to a 2018 survey from the analytics company SAS, 6 in 10 consumers felt comfortable with the prospect of their physicians using AI for treatment plans.2 This could be because AI investments made on the back-end yield major care improvements on the patient-facing side of the business.3

An aviation industry startup accelerator program has selected an artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP)-based platform called Whispr to help improve the speed, accuracy and safety of aircraft inspections and turnarounds. As part of International Airline Group's (IAG) Hangar 51 accelerator program, Whispr is partnering with Spanish carrier Iberia to implement its hands-free voice guidance platform on two projects. The first project is being conducted with Iberia Maintenance at Madrid-Barajas Airport (MAD) to digitize the aircraft inspection documentation process on the airline's new fleet of Airbus A350s, which up until now has been entirely paper-based. According to Hugh O'Flanagan, Whispr's co-founder and CEO, the existing inspection process entails engineers walking around the aircraft and checking tens of items in each different section as they manually complete a paper-based report, which then has to be manually input into a system.

Shares finished down 7.6% at $134.05, a decline that sliced 75 points off the Dow Jones Industrial Average and sent the stock to its lowest close in more than two and a half years. Shares are down more than 15% from a year ago. IBM on Tuesday reported adjusted profit that topped Wall Street's forecast. Its 2.1% slide in revenue from a year ago served as a reminder of the company's yearslong struggle to ditch its legacy image as a computer maker and refocus on fast-growing businesses such as cloud computing and services driven by artificial intelligence. "It was clearly a disappointing quarter," said John Conti, a partner at SeaBridge Investment Advisors LLC, which is an investor in IBM.

For the operators of large helicopters, the principle of big data is nothing new. For years, these companies and their associated MRO operations have been collecting and analyzing vibration data from onboard health and usage monitoring systems (HUMS), looking for potential issues within an aircraft's dynamic systems as well as clues to potential maintenance problems. However, in the current era of analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithms, new uses for the data coming off the helicopters are being enabled and helping to democratize the use of systems like HUMS. "Today in the helicopter world, a lot of things are being done in the maintenance world as they would have been 40-50 years ago," says Matthieu Louvot, executive vice president for customer support and services at Airbus Helicopters. "Now is the time to digitize."

Acobot LLC, an artificial intelligence startup, announced a new release of its artificial intelligence Aco, featuring the capability of self-learning from free-form text such as web pages and creating conversational AI chatbots, which are ready to work as virtual agents for customer support automation, without any further training by a human. Conversational AI and chatbots are often mentioned as today and tomorrow in the tech circles. For businesses, the efficiency and cost savings derived from the chatbot's interacting with customers is attractive. As a result, more and more businesses include a chatbot with their website in the recent years. However, lacking in natural language processing (NLP) support, most of those chatbots only accept clicks or match answers by keyword, resulting in poor performance.

IBM (NYSE:IBM) is in the middle of reinventing itself from a hardware company that sells servers to businesses, to a services company that provides platforms, analytics, and cloud computing to its customers. Sure, it still sells hardware, but IBM is continually looking ahead to a world where service revenue dominates its top line. To that end, IBM recently made an announcement about a new artificial intelligence (AI) platform it's launching, called Cloud Private for Data. The name doesn't necessarily roll off the tongue, but IBM says that this new data science and machine learning platform will make it easier for its customers to make data-driven decisions. "Designed to help companies uncover previously unobtainable insights from their data, the platform is also designed to enable users to build and exploit event-driven applications capable of analyzing the torrents of data from things like IoT sensors, online commerce, mobile devices, and more," the company said in a press release.

In late June, BlackBerry reported quarterly earnings that missed analysts' forecasts due to an unexpected sales decline, ramping up pressure on the company to meet its goal of boosting software and services revenue by 10 percent to 15 percent this year. BlackBerry declined to comment on the stock price, but QNX manager Grant Courville said it expected to sign deals with at least three major companies to get QNX into self-driving vehicles.

Uber's culture problems appear far from solved. Board member David Bonderman resigned Tuesday after making sexist comment at a meeting that took place a day after the release of a report into allegations of a hostile work environment at Uber. CEO Travis Kalanick is on an indefinite leave of absence. When he returns, he'll likely have a completely new management team. SAN FRANCISCO -- Uber now has 47 detailed recommendations from an exhaustive internal investigation on how to overhaul its company culture, from making its board more independent to keeping records of human resources complaints.