Would you buy a product or service from a company you have not heard of but was recommended by your voice-based personal assistant? Well, 46% of consumers in Southeast Asia recently surveyed said they would.

If you have been exploring blockchains and distributed ledger technology (DLT), you know it’s a noisy and confusing space. As with any early tech, very smart people disagree about what the future will look like. Fueled by open source tools, innovation has dispersed and accelerated to a pace at which no organization on their own can keep up. Throw in a steep learning curve, and it’s really hard to know if you are making the right move. So what can you do?

As we look ahead to the trends and technologies that will likely dominate this next year and decade, it makes sense to begin by unpacking how AI might continue its march forward and the opportunities it will create for female entrepreneurs, engineers, marketers, and others.

“The pace of business change has intensified dramatically as the fruits of digital technologies expand to the entire economy in the Fourth Industrial Revolution. In 2020, I hope to see the transformative potential of technologies such as artificial intelligence and automation reach the next level in helping businesses solve bigger challenges and invent entirely new products, services and experiences.”

In mid December, LinkedIn revealed that Artificial Intelligence (AI) Specialist was the top emerging job for 2020; this may not be of much surprise but it does beg the question of what AI specialists actually do, and what the job entails. What are the exact skills and knowledge businesses need from AI Specialists?

(First published in The Business Times, Singapore, on January 3.) If we were to think of digital networking as vehicles, 3G would now seem like riding a cart, 4G like driving an economy car with decent mileage, and 5G would be like breaking the sound barrier with an F-16 fighter jet. Put simply, speed is the benchmark for network connectivity, and 5G is set to be more than 30 times faster than the fastest available option.

Cognizant’s Bret Greenstein, global head of artificial intelligence and analytics, and Matt O’Kane, head of artificial intelligence and analytics for Europe discuss how organizations can approach implementing evolutionary AI.

There are legitimate questions about the ethics of employing AI in place of human workers. But what about when there's a moral imperative to automate?

Ramkumar Ramamoorthy, the recently-anointed chairman and managing director of tech major Cognizant’s Indian arm says that quality of talent available for recruitment has actually improved in the last few years. But that isn’t enough for an industry that is turning really hungry for some new-age skills. He elaborates on these skills in this two-part interview.

Ramkumar Ramamoorthy was recently appointed as Chairman and Managing Director of tech major Cognizant’s India operations. With new CEO Brian Humphries taking charge at the global level, Cognizant has brought about changes to its strategy and operations.

David Ingham, digital partner in media and entertainment, explores the various ways in which AI is changing the entertainment industry.

In 2007, Pradeep Bhaskaran joined Cognizant to oversee HR for 10 countries around the world. Today, that number is 47. As head of HR for global growth markets, Bhaskaran is responsible for more than 60,000 associates across 52 nationalities that speak 34 languages. And those figures are only set to grow.

Cognizant on Friday announced the retirement of its Chief People Officer (CPO) James Lennox and appointment of Becky Schmitt, currently senior vice president and CPO at Sam’s Club

“The lesson here is that business leaders need to be AI-aware,” says Jeff Olson, Head of Applied AI & Analytics for ANZ. “To do this, they must embrace data as the source of wisdom and value for their business. They need to ask better questions and expect more ― don’t ask for another report or spreadsheet, ask ‘Why?’ until you understand the root causes.”

To “beat the robots,” we shall need to join them. Robotic personal assistants will help buy back at least that 15 percent capacity (or more) needed for the skills of tomorrow. And that is nothing to be afraid of.

“With greater visibility of technology-driven initiatives, CIOs have to be better politicians than ever,” says Pring.

Earlier this year the potential for widescale disruption of the electric grid was highlighted, following a nationwide powercut. This vulnerability was caused by the combined complexity of integrating more renewable energy and distributed energy resources (DERs). We need to treat this as a serious wake-up call.

“We have reskilled our employees at scale through every disruptive technology shift to date, be it Mainframe, distributed computing or Internet. While those shifts were driven by single technologies followed by long periods of stability, digital is significantly different. In digital, we see the coming together of multiple technologies such as automation, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, blockchain, additive manufacturing and 3D printing, and we are less likely to see long periods of stability,” says Ramkumar Ramamoorthy, CMD.

Smart devices, powered by the hyper-connected Internet of Things (IoT), are becoming ever more prevalent and pervasive in our lives, and the trend will only continue. With a growing number of devices, the opportunities to use IoT to reshape industries and societies are also increasing.

“Hybrid cloud in all its permutations supplies the capabilities, agility, standardization, scalability and enhanced control needed for an enterprise to quickly develop, deploy and support...

“Conversational AI is the next stage, and it is what is making voice way more popular than it was before,” explains Philippe Dintrans, Chief Digital Officer, Banking and Financial Services, Cognizant.

For those living with chronic conditions, clothing can serve as a frictionless digital Sherpa leveraging biometrics, environmental data, and feedback mechanisms to guide the wearer toward better managing their disease and medication.

We are already witnessing the infiltration of healthcare and healthcare delivery by robots. In the next few years this infiltration will become a full-on assault on the traditional apprenticeship nature of medical training and care delivery. The reasons for this are simple: demand for care exceeds capacity; our clinical knowledge base is expanding at unprecedented rates that make it impossible for any clinician to keep abreast; cost of care is too high; access to care has been constrained by physical barriers – the location of a facility or the hours of its operation.

Technology advancement and broad-based commercialization of wearables and sensors are pivotal to the shift towards siteless trials enabling remote, unobtrusive and real-time capture of patient data. This use of sensors and real-time data capture vastly improves the quality of clinical data with the potential to reduce site queries and monitoring visits, not to mention the accessibility to unprecedented volumes of patient data to power safety and clinical insights.

Like it or not, AI will soon infiltrate every aspect of our society from our refrigerators to autonomous cars and everything in between. Combined with data and data science, AI offers new, smart ways to solve existing problems and create fresh and exciting opportunities. But how do you determine the importance of an AI initiative for your organization and how do you ensure you derive the maximum benefit from implementing such projects?