NEW DELHI: India-based outsourcing and information technology company Infosys has released global research on the impact artificial intelligence (AI) technology implementations in the enterprise are having on return-on-investment (ROI), the workforce and organizational leadership.

The research report, Leadership in the Age of AI, surveyed more than 1,000 business and IT leaders with decision-making power over AI solutions or purchases at large organizations across seven countries.

The research findings point to a fundamental shift in how enterprises operate as AI takes hold. Enterprises are moving beyond the experimentation phase with AI, deploying AI technologies more broadly and realizing benefits across their business. According to the survey, 73 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that their AI deployments have already transformed the way they do business, and 90 percent of C-level executives reported measurable benefits from AI within their organization. Additionally, the data showed organizations are taking steps to prepare employees and business leaders for the future of work, with 53 percent of respondents indicating that their organization has increased training in the job functions most affected by AI deployments.

Mohit Joshi, President, Infosys: “While it’s fair to say that, like most promising new technologies, there has been a tremendous amount of hype around AI, it turns out that the vast majority of enterprises with AI deployments are realizing clear and measureable results.

AI, as the research shows, is becoming core to business strategy, and is compelling business leaders to alter the way they hire, train and inspire teams, and the way they compete and foster innovation. Industry disruption from AI is no longer imminent, it is here. The organizations that embrace AI with a clearly defined strategy and use AI to amplify their workforce rather than replace it, will take the lead, and those that don’t will fall behind or find themselves irrelevant.”

Key findings:

Enterprise AI moves beyond experimentation: AI deployments are no longer imminent but are becoming pervasive as 86 percent of organizations surveyed have middle- or late-stage AI deployments and view AI as a major facilitator of future business operations. Eighty percent of respondents who said they’ve seen at least some measurable benefits from AI agreed or strongly agreed that their organization had a defined strategy for deployment. Fifty-three percent of all respondents said that their industry has already experienced disruption due to artificial intelligence technologies.

Beyond automation, the benefits of AI span the business value chain: While a majority of organizations (66 percent) start off using AI to automate routine or inefficient processes, businesses in later stages of AI deployment are leveraging the technology to innovate and differentiate. For example, 80 percent of IT decision makers at organizations in later stages of AI deployment reported that they are using AI to augment existing solutions, or build new business-critical solutions and services to optimize insights and the consumer experience. Forty-two percent of these organizations also expect significant impact in research and development in the next five years.

ROI market and industry breakdown: India, the United States and China led geographies with the most respondents stating that their organization has realized direct, tangible results from deploying AI technologies with 75 percent, 71 percent and 61 percent respectively. Australia trailed behind the leading geographies with 57 percent followed by the United Kingdom (42 percent), Germany (40 percent) and France (33 percent). The leading industries currently using AI to automate business processes include retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) at 85 percent, followed by telecom and communication service providers (83 percent) and banking and insurance (80 percent).

Investing in people is key to AI success: Seventy-seven percent of respondents surveyed were confident that employees in their organization can be trained for the new job roles AI technologies will create. Respondents showed commitment to this belief by ranking training and recruitment as the top areas of investment (46 percent and 44 percent respectively) in order for AI technologies to make an impact. C-level executives likewise called out training the leadership team on AI as a top priority—47 percent of business leaders put leadership training in their top three priorities compared to 40 percent who put employee training in their top three priorities.

AI leadership essentials include strategy and training: Four out of five C-level executives said that their future business strategy will be informed through opportunities made available with AI technology. Business leaders were confident that their executive teams have the ability to adapt their leadership skills as AI technologies are adopted, with 80 percent of C-level executives in agreement. However, training on the executive level is still critical as three-fourths of IT decision makers felt that their executives would benefit from formal training on the implications of AI technologies.

Other important findings include:

Data management is a persistent obstacle: Nearly half of IT decision makers (49 percent) reported that their organization is unable to deploy the AI technologies they want because their data is not ready to support the requirements of AI technologies. As such, approximately 77 percent of IT decision makers said that their organization is investing in data management. Furthermore, C-level executives reported that their leadership team is concerned with the implications of industry regulations on their ability to use AI technologies within their business (70 percent) and the potential advantages AI technologies could lend to competition (66 percent).

Weighing ethical concerns and benefits among the workforce: Sixty-nine percent of C-level executives reported that employees within their organization are concerned AI technologies will replace them. However, ranked among the top two ways their current AI deployments have impacted their business, 48 percent of respondents cited that AI has augmented human skills to make their people better at their work, and 45 percent said AI is making for better employees because it frees up their time for higher value work.

The rise of AI professionals throughout the ranks of businesses: According to the data, IT (61 percent) will continue to be the most affected job function over the next five years. However, AI is beginning to have a growing impact on marketing and communications (32 percent), human resources (29 percent) and legal departments (15 percent). AI leaders will become fixtures in the C-suite and throughout the organization as an overwhelming majority (95 percent) of IT decision makers from organizations in the late stages of digital transformation said that their organization plans to have a dedicated team of AI professionals.

Business leaders are optimistic that AI technologies will ultimately create more opportunity for employees than they will eliminate, with C-level executives widely agreeing that AI technologies will have a positive effect on their workforce (70%) and equally benefit customers (45 percent) and employees (43 percent).

NEW DELHI: US-based software firm Amdocs today was first in the industry to announce a 5G-ready online charging system.

This new solution enables service providers to process traffic from multiple network slices through a common online charging system, in accordance with the 5G standards guidelines1 published by 3GPPTM in December 2017.

Network slicing is a key capability in 5G networks, as it allows service providers to run multiple logical networks that meet the varying performance needs of different services – from eHealth and autonomous vehicles, which demand the lowest possible latency, to less-critical but bandwidth-demanding virtual and augmented reality applications.

The latest release of Amdocs’ market-leading digital monetization suite provides a centralized charging entity for the monetization of all service configurations made possible by network slicing. It includes an innovative isolation mechanism that ensures the level of activity in one network slice does not impact another. Deployed in the cloud with the OpenStack cloud framework, the solution provides the elasticity to scale on-demand in support of changing activity levels.

“Our customers are leading the way in the industry’s transition to 5G, which will serve as the backbone for a new generation of services that require the higher bandwidth, lower latency and greater agility that 5G provides,” said Anthony Goonetilleke, group president of Amdocs Technology.

“As such, we have developed the latest version of our Digital Monetization suite to help them monetize the advanced product configurations that network slicing enables. It will also help them ensure that a customer connected to a 24/7 vital eHealth service, delivered over one network slice, is not impacted by an overload of events from another network slice streaming a live football match,” added Goonetilleke.

“We are happy 3GPP has adopted guidelines that are consistent with the direction we have taken with our portfolio. This ability of our online charging system to support multiple network slices, coupled with its deployment in the cloud with the OpenStack cloud framework, is going to be critical to agility and the customer experience in 5G environments,” said Goonetilleke.

NEW DELHI: For decades, Microsoft has been at the forefront of converging technologies to offer progressive innovation as a technology company. At the heart of the new Microsoft is Azure, a global computing cloud used to build, deploy and manage applications through an unparalleled global network of datacentres.

This has enabled Microsoft to be able to offer unparalleled differentiation in futuristic uses of cloud technologies. Moving into 2018 with the aim to empower every Indian and every Indian organisation with best-in-class technology, Microsoft offers its legacy software’s as services on Azure cloud, thus enabling businesses in India to accelerate their digital transformation in delivering new customer experiences throughout 2017.

Till date, Azure supports the widest range of programming languages, frameworks, operating systems, databases, and devices, allowing enterprises to leverage the tools and technologies they trust.

In 2016, using Microsoft’s Cloud infrastructure, over 2000 start-ups created a range of IT solutions for retail, e-commerce, banking, logistics, energy, healthcare, and FMCG organisations. Since then the firm’s addressable market is far bigger now.

In 2017, Microsoft saw India’s top IT companies and talent combine the finest that Microsoft offers with open source data, AI innovations on Azure to create data-driven, intelligent apps. As a result, a significant number of Indian businesses are driving innovation using Microsoft’s advanced cloud services in areas such as big data, IoT, advanced analytics, and cognitive services.

Marquee customers such as Tata Motors, Flipkart, Ola, SBI and Wipro amongst others (see 2017 commercial announcements appended below), are taking advantage of Microsoft’s unmatched security, privacy, transparency and the most comprehensive compliance coverage of any cloud provider.

Over the past year, along with increased adoption, the Microsoft Azure team has explicitly focused on removing all barriers for enterprise customers, so that even the most complex technology and policy requirements are uniquely met with Azure.

We keep you informed on the most interesting technical advancements made to Azure in the year gone by around four key areas:

Enabling IT and developer productivity
Providing a consistent hybrid cloud
Unlocking AI solutions
Ensuring trust through security, privacy and cost controls.
April:

SQL Server 2017 now enables in-database advanced machine learning with support for scalable Python and R-based analytics, to train advanced models easily with data inside SQL Server without having to move data.

A new time series insights (TSI) tools was launched called Azure Time Series Insights – a fully-managed analytics, storage, and visualisation service that helps developers manage IoT-scale time-series data in the cloud.
May:

For organisations moving to a DevOps approach, Microsoft has tightly integrated Azure and Visual Studio Team Services to provide an end-to-end DevOps experience, with no need to patch together different dev tools like other clouds; with Azure it’s all built in, regardless of which OS you’re using or language you choose.

A fully managed Azure SQL Database service, now with 100 percent SQL Server compatibility for no code changes via managed instance; also introduced a new Azure Database Migration Service that enables a near-zero downtime migration.
September:

Azure’s integrated management tools continue to expand end-to-end monitoring, alerting, and now provide central policy management for all VMs (virtual machines) created in Azure; combined with the new PowerShell and Bash support in Azure Cloud Shell, organisations are armed for efficiently running literally any application on Azure.

Enabling consistent development across cloud and on-premises, Azure Stack integrated systems are now shipping and available for purchase.

Taking advantage of Azure Hybrid Benefits, customers can gain up to 50% reduction in licensing costs; combined with the no-code changes with Azure Database Migration Service, it’s clear that Azure is the most cost-effective cloud to run your Windows Server and SQL Server applications.

Azure Cosmos DB launched, the first globally distributed, multi-model database service delivering turnkey global horizontal scale out with guaranteed millisecond latency and uptime; a new combination of Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Functions enables developers to use event-driven-server-less computing at global scale.

Announced breakthrough new Azure Machine Learning capabilities, including a new Machine Learning Workbench, that dramatically improves AI productivity of any developer or data scientist, to enable a new generation of AI-powered apps and experiences; Azure has built the entire stack for AI – from infrastructure, to platform services, to AI dev tools; this offers the most complete, end-to-end AI capabilities such that AI solutions are possible for any developer and any scenario.

Announced that Cloudyn is now integrated into Azure and the new Azure Cost Management services will be free for all Azure customers.
November:

A new Azure DDoS protection service is launched that monitors the public IP addresses of your resources within Azure, learns an application’s normal traffic patterns, and instantly mitigates a DDoS attack when it is detected.

Now powered by Microsoft’s Intelligent Security Graph, the Azure Security Center provides both security recommendations and threat detection, for an end-to-end, integrated security toolset.