Articles about AI

Today, 80 percent of digital marketers feel growing pressure to meet customer acquisition and revenue goals, saying they feel like they are "running on a never-ending hamster wheel."

And that’s true: You may be overstretching your marketing muscle to get your customers to find you through organic search -- but it’s something you have little control over and is reactive. Traditional advertising media is becoming more obsolete, but the problem is that many businesses still don’t realize how technology can reverse that. Take the example of the automotive industry, where customer acquisition is still very reactive. The majority of customers still find the auto dealer and brand, and not the other way round. A recent study found that car dealers' first point of contact with more than half of their buyers is when they physically walk into the dealership, essentially leaving it to chance that their dealership or brand gets picked for a walk-in. There’s no doubt that companies across the board are rapidly experimenting with adopting artificial intelligence (AI) in various departments, including business performance and automating the human tasks, the low-hanging fruits. But it’s time you thought about bringing it in to enhance your customer acquisition strategy.

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AI and automation were becoming standard business practices long before the pandemic. As coronavirus shutdowns send shockwaves throughout the economy, though, companies turn to these solutions faster than ever before. Organizations around the world are investing in automated systems to maintain efficiency through the outbreak.

Companies are having to deal with a myriad of complications as a result of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Many have had to scale back and let staff go, and some are facing new and unexpected demands. Tools like AI have become vital to sustainment amid the growing recession.

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There are privacy concerns following the revelation that confidential data from UK coronavirus patients is being used by technology firms and government to build predictive computer models to help fight the pandemic.

US big data firm Palantir and UK AI startup Faculty are working together to put together what has been described as a "COVID-19 datastore". Pulling together information from government databases as well as information from health services, the project also makes use of highly personal data relating to individual patients according to documents seen by the Guardian.

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The rapid evolution of cybersecurity remained a major issue for small businesses in 2019, being named the top concern for all businesses, regardless of their size. Along with an increase in the number of cybercrimes, the cost of recovering from an attack means keeping ahead of the curve is vital for SMBs going forward.

This is challenging enough for businesses operating on a small budget, but fast-paced changes in technology mean that security resources are increasingly being stretched in a number of directions. Rather than protecting a single, traditional office, security must now cover a whole range of devices used for IoT and mobile working. Proactivity is now essential to an effective security strategy. By looking ahead to the trends of the next 12 months, SMBs can begin to identify the new challenges around cybersecurity that they will need to prepare for.

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The cloud has revolutionized making it easy to build, launch, and scale a service. That's driven a wave of spending on the major cloud providers, as made evident by the latest earnings reports from Microsoft (Azure), Amazon (AWS), and Google (Google Cloud). Microsoft just reported 62 percent QoQ growth for Azure, AWS brought in nearly $10 billion for Amazon in Q4 2019, and Google reported cloud earnings for the first time in January.

Companies of all sizes are clearly investing billions on the cloud and there doesn't seem to be a ceiling. Gartner predicts that by 2022 overall cloud spend will reach more than $330 billion, and that number grows every year. But at the same time, current estimates reveal that billions of this spend is the result of needless and wasted outlay. A recent survey of companies that spend at least $5 million on the cloud annually found that a vast majority (69 percent) regularly overspend on their cloud budget by 25 percent or more.

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Images for use in development projects need to be correctly labeled to be of use. But adding labels is a task that can involve many hours of work by human analysts painstakingly applying manual labels to images, time that could be better spent on other, more creative, tasks.

In order to streamline the labelling process IBM has created a new automated labeling tool for the open source Cloud Annotations project that uses AI to 'auto-label' images and thus speed up the process.

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We’ve all heard the scare stories -- it’s only a matter of time before artificial intelligence will destroy millions of professionals’ livelihoods. Given the media frenzy accompanying the rapid advancements of artificial intelligence (AI), it’s not surprising that many people hold such a view. And while there is some truth to these dystopian predictions, they’re not as apocalyptic as they’re often made out to be.

Let’s start with some concrete research to shed a light on what professionals can expect in the coming months and years. In 2018, the World Economic Forum released a report suggesting that 75 million jobs may be displaced globally by a shift in the division of labor between humans and machines in the next five years. It goes on to say that, at the same time, 133 million new roles may emerge that are more adapted to this division. This insinuates that we could see the creation of 58 million new jobs in just half a decade. What it also suggests is that, perhaps we’re asking the wrong questions. Instead of worrying about robots taking over our jobs, we should instead be considering how AI might reshape the workforce -- and how we can adapt. 

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Visions of the future have long featured robots and cyborgs. We've seen robots, and even rudimentary human augmentation already, but now scientists have created the world's first living robots.

American researchers used cells from African clawed frogs to build biological machines from the ground up. Built from different biological tissues, scientists have brought into being "living, programmable organisms" and potentially opened up an ethical can of worms.

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Many predictions that we saw around artificial intelligence (AI) for 2019 leaned towards one extreme or the other -- ranging from the notion that AI will no longer be a thing to the idea that it’ll realize its full potential and completely change how industries work at a fundamental level. Advancing AI is going to be an incremental process and it’s unrealistic to think that the world will suddenly abandon it completely or exponentially accelerate its development in that area.

But in the security industry, we have still seen progress surrounding AI, as we’ve gotten better at using machine learning technology to identify and recognize behaviors to identify security anomalies. In most cases, security technology can now correlate the anomalous behavior with threat intelligence and contextual data from other systems. It can also leverage automated investigative actions to provide an analyst with a strong picture of something being bad or not with minimal human intervention.

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It's hard to believe that artificial intelligence is in its earliest stages. But for however many Alexas and self-driving cars we have now, experts say we have only scratched the surface of what AI can achieve.

In 2020, we'll see even more new applications of it -- here's what to expect.

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Ethical human hackers supported by machine learning and artificial intelligence are 73 percent more efficient at identifying and evaluating cyber risks and threats according to a new report.

The study from crowdsourced security platform Synack also finds this combination of cybersecurity talent and AI results in 20 times more effective attack surface coverage than traditional methods.

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Artificial intelligence is a controversial subject in any field -- including practicing the law. Even now, lawyers and law firms weigh the positives and negatives of using AI to dispense legal advice or automate basic tasks.

Here’s a look at both sides of the argument.

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A large majority of cybersecurity and risk management leaders (83 percent) believe that developments in 5G wireless technology will create challenges for their organizations.

A new report from UK-based cybersecurity specialist Information Risk Management (IRM) shows that among the top 5G-related concerns are greater risk of attacks on Internet of Things networks, a wider attack surface and a lack of security by design in 5G hardware and firmware.

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Microsoft has announced that it is introducing new filters that will enable Xbox Live players to avoid language they may find offensive or unacceptable. It is hoped that the AI-powered system will help to reduce trolling and bullying.

The system will be optional and will offer three levels of language filtering, as well as the option of remaining unfiltered. It's an expansion of Microsoft's family settings, and the company says it recognizes "that while some adults use profanity without any ill intent while gaming, parents with small children likely won't find this same experience acceptable".

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As artificial intelligence, or AI, moves further and further into a future we only dared to dream of before, we now have to find ways to coexist with our robot counterparts.

The robots are shaping up to adapt to our nature in a way only other humans could previously do. Now, we might have robots that are advanced enough to feel the tension in a room.

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