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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Nothing in our lifetimes has prepared us for what's happening in our world today. We've certainly had our share of major catastrophes in the past 100 years -- both natural and man made -- but nothing matches the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. We are living in a time when fundamental assumptions about how our societies function are being thrown out and re-written with blinding speed.

The degree of global disruption is unprecedented in scope and scale, and we're still in the early phases. Given the confluence of medical, social, political, and economic factors, we have not yet reached the peak of the impact, and the world we'll inherit as the storm tide recedes will be significantly changed, and changeable. This is not to suggest that "the end is nigh" or that all changes wrought by the pandemic will be bad. But the undeniable truth is that we are experiencing an unexpected and extreme test of our AI technologies and their ability to automate and improve our ability to make good decisions quickly in increasingly complex situations. With respect to AI, we are entering an especially critical phase.

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When it comes to making quick, real-time business decisions, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has proven to be a vital component of any effective business strategy. This is reflected in statistics showing how AI implementation jumped from 48 percent in 2018 to 72 percent in 2019. As technology continues to improve, no doubt this number will continue to increase with AI becoming an even larger asset to improve your operational capacity.

If utilized correctly, real-time AI has the ability to vastly improve real-time decisions for companies throughout the customer journey – from acquisition through to customer service and customer retention.

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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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The UK government has announced plans to spend £1.2 billion ($1.6 billion) on what it describes as "the world's most powerful weather and climate supercomputer".

The investment will make weather forecasts faster and more accurate, and the computer will make it easier to predict the impact of climate change. It will be managed by the Met Office, and will be used to help communities and government agencies better prepare for severe weather.

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More than a third of AI and analytics projects in the cloud are failing due to poor quality data according to a new survey.

The study from data specialist Trifacta surveyed 646 data professionals across different industries and titles to examine how organizations are handling the accelerating transition of data to the cloud, the obstacles of data cleaning for analytics and the time constraints they face when preparing data.

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Artificial intelligence is making its way into more and more areas of our lives. But how much of this is hype and how much is genuine innovation? And can improved AI learning models deliver better commercial solutions?

We spoke to Ben Lamm, CEO of Hypergiant Industries, a company at the cutting edge of solving problems with AI, to find out.

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Over the last decade we've seen significant advances in AI and machine learning. But there's more on its way, with ML set disrupt almost every industry sector in the decade to come.

We spoke to Eric Loftsgaarden, VP of Data Science and co-founder of consulting services company Atrium to find out how ML can be used to set businesses apart from their competitors and give start ups an edge in traditional industries.

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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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Artificial intelligence is making its way into more and more areas of our lives. But what can we expect to see happen in this area in 2020? Some industry experts share their views on the latest AI trends.

Synthetic data specialist ARM Insight believes, "There will be a huge investment return gap between those using basic analytics or simplistic machine learning on data from those that are using true artificial intelligence. Machine learning simply won’t cut it any more. Artificial intelligence will be the only path to maximum data value."

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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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Businesses are generating ever larger quantities of data, much of it in unstructured form. Extracting value from this massive amount of information can be difficult, which is why it can sometimes feel as if there is simply too much data.

Augmented intelligence specialist Yewno believes it has the technology to help people research and to understand the world in a more natural manner, inspired by the way humans process information from multiple sensorial channels. We spoke to the company's CEO, Ruggero Gramatica, to find out more.

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We hear a lot about the use of AI in improving security products, but in most cases the assumption is that it will in some way mimic human intelligence.

Finnish company F-Secure is challenging that assumption with an initiative it calls Project Blackfin. This aims to use collective intelligence techniques, such as swarm intelligence, to create adaptive, autonomous AI agents that collaborate with each other to achieve common goals.

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