The UK is aspiring to become an artificial intelligence (AI) superpower, and nothing seems to be able to stop it from achieving its ambitious goal. If we were to take a look at the progress the UK did in the past 10 years, we'll notice the number of AI companies has grown astronomically or, more exactly, by over 600 percent. If back in 2011, the UK had only 180 AI companies, today it numbers over 1,300, and the number keeps growing at a head-spinning rate. Much like in the decades when the superpowers of the world were competing for space supremacy, currently, governments compete to achieve artificial intelligence supremacy. The UK's AI sector has made a name of its own in the world due to phenomenal minds and generous government funding that amounts to £1 billion – public-sector investments and funds coming from private companies and academic partnerships.

I'm the president of O'Reilly, which offers a learning platform that helps organisations stay ahead of the latest technologies. Two of our larger clients in the UK are a financial organisation with about 7,000 active users on our learning platform and a telecommunications company with about 20,000. Both have very high levels of engagement with resources about AI and ML--greater than the average per-user consumption on our platform. Now, these companies are big enough that they likely can hire as needed, but they know the importance of upskilling their current workforce. Not only is it cost-effective for the organisation, but it also provides growth opportunities to those who are willing to learn something new.

With the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence technology, how are AI-generated inventions recognised when it comes to patents? Innovation funding and Patent Box experts ABGI UK have recently looked into where inventions created by artificial intelligence (AI) systems currently stand in regard to intellectual property, and how potential changes will affect U.K. businesses. The output has been shared with Digital Journal. One important point that arises from AI, is that as artificial intelligence becomes increasingly advanced, how is AI-generated innovation considered when it comes to intellectual property? The issue is perhaps more pertinent than ever following the case earlier this year of Thaler v Comptroller General of Patents, Trade Marks and Designs.

If you've heard it once, you've heard it dozens of times: "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans." When it comes to its corporate acquisitions, Cupertino likes to play its cards very close to its chest. Of course, that doesn't stop industry watchers from peering at the tea leaves to see if they can divine exactly what the company might be working on. And, hey, I'm no different than those folks, because Apple does so little to telegraph its plans that even a boilerplate statement confirming an acquisition is a rare peek behind the curtain. Apple CEO Tim Cook said not long ago that the company makes an acquisition every two to three weeks, and not even all of those make it into the public eye.

The potential benefits of AI for businesses are huge. But those benefits could be eroded by hidden biases that damage brand reputation and customer trust, according to a survey of US and UK businesses commissioned by DataRobot. According to DataRobot's "The State of AI Bias in 2019," which was released last week, 42% of organizations surveyed reported being "very to extremely" concerned about AI bias occurring in their organizations. This number jibes with another finding from the DataRobot survey: that 38% of the organizations surveyed reported they use "black box" machine learning systems that offer no insight into how it makes decisions. The juxtaposition of AI bias concerns and black box systems is enough to warrant serious questions about the direction compaines should take with their machine learning, according to John Giannandrea, Apple's senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy.

This number jibes with another finding from the DataRobot survey: that 38% of the organizations surveyed reported they use "black box" machine learning systems that offer no insight into how it makes decisions. The juxtaposition of AI bias concerns and black box systems is enough to warrant serious questions about the direction compaines should take with their machine learning, according to John Giannandrea, Apple's senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy. "If someone is trying to sell you a black box system… and you don't know how it works or what data was used to train it, then I wouldn't trust it," DataRobot quotes Giannandrea as saying in its report. The survey indicates that organizations are aware of the potential pitfalls and are actively working to mitigate it. DataRobot found that 64% of survey respondents say they're "very to extremely" confident in their ability to identify AI bias.

The potential benefits of AI for businesses are huge. But those benefits could be eroded by hidden biases that damage brand reputation and customer trust, according to a survey of US and UK businesses commissioned by DataRobot. According to DataRobot's "The State of AI Bias in 2019," which was released last week, 42% of organizations surveyed reported being "very to extremely" concerned about AI bias occurring in their organizations. This number jibes with another finding from the DataRobot survey: that 38% of the organizations surveyed reported they use "black box" machine learning systems that offer no insight into how it makes decisions. The juxtaposition of AI bias concerns and black box systems is enough to warrant serious questions about the direction compaines should take with their machine learning, according to John Giannandrea, Apple's senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy.

Whilst the'special relationship' between the UK and the US has been put to the test this week following a diplomatic dispute, it's clear that there are still mutually beneficial investment opportunities for the two nations - particularly in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence (RAI). That was the view of a cohort of leading experts from the UK's RAI research, start-up and enterprise communities, who were taken out to California and Texas in March of this year on a mission to meet with some of the US's leading aerospace, marine and cross-cutting technology companies. The cohort included people from D-RiskQ, Shadow Robot, Rolls Royce, London Southbank University, Brunel University, Soil Machine Dynamics, Forth Engineering, Autonomous Devices, Headlight.AI and HyBird. Their feedback was presented at an event yesterday in central London, alongside the publication of their findings in new Knowledge Transfer Network (KTN) report - 'USA Robotics & AI in Extreme Environments 2019'. I'd recommend reading the report for a full overview of the mission and the RAI opportunities available.

British companies that fail to invest in artificial intelligence soon are at risk of losing 20pc of their cash flow, McKinsey has warned. New figures claim that AI could boost the UK economy by 22pc in the next decade by making companies more productive, and fast-moving businesses could stand to grow in value by 120pc if they invest in AI tools. A new report produced by the consultancy's business and economics research arm McKinsey Global Institute has claimed the UK is "potentially more AI-ready compared with the global average", but could miss out on the opportunity if investment does not occur. "The United Kingdom has impressive pockets of innovation but is failing to scale to business more broadly," the report stated. It cited DeepMind, which was bought by Google for £306m in 2014, and Magic Pony, which was taken over by Twitter in a £102m deal in 2016, as examples of these pockets.

This week, ServiceNow released the results of a new report, revealing that a majority of organisations have introduced advanced automation in their workplace – with the full effects being felt next year. A third of companies said that by 2018 they will need greater automation to handle the volume of tasks being generated. By 2020, eight out of 10 UK companies will hit that breaking point which is being contributed to by the overload created by mobile devices and the Internet of Things (IoT). Intelligent automation could address the issue of the breaking point and increase productivity. This includes artificial intelligence or machine learning to streamline decision making to improve the speed and accuracy of business processes.