Bad news for companies swelling with pride over their new artificial intelligence project: The odds of pocketing any business value from one AI pilot are slim. They’re going to have to rapidly cycle through lots of projects to improve odds. It’s possible — companies just have to stop thinking of AI as magic and start plying ...

For those companies with pockets of innovation success, the challenge is to scale constant, iterative innovation throughout their organization. To do so, companies must rethink their entire information technology systems, but what does this system of the future look like? “It naturally is about breaking down barriers — between systems, between businesses, in between humans and machines,” said Chris Scott (pictured, right), ...

Companies worried they’re not keeping up with the innovation Joneses shouldn’t feel too badly. Shockingly, few companies are seeing returns on their innovation investments, according to recent research from Accenture LLP. Luckily, there are a handful of successes in the bunch from which the rest of us can learn. Over the past five years, companies have spent ...

Anybody recall their last contact-center experience fondly? One suffers plenty of inefficiencies and hassles when attempting something that should be easy — like switching a subscription plan or challenging an item on a bill. Thank goodness some folks are finally cutting through this thicket of frustrations with modern technology. “This space — contact center — hasn’t really radically ...

What is a 70-year-old business to do when it finally realizes it needs to move to cloud in order to modernize? Does it corral its information technology team and put it through cloud training and certification courses? Not if it’s the Educational Testing Service Inc., a nonprofit educational measurement organization. Instead, it just gets Accenture ...

Consumers expect instant gratification from software applications nowadays. Such demands call for apps that talk back in natural language and resolve queries in real time. The infrastructure required for such an easy end-user experience is anything but easy to operate. That’s why some companies opt to outsource the necessary operations to specialist service vendors. In recent years, real time ...

Distributed information technology systems are becoming the norm, and they’re complicated to manage when running smoothly. When a problem jams the wheels, it can cause headaches for everyone on an IT team. How do they navigate the complex, winding system and fix the problem before it impacts the business? A big problem seen in distributed systems is ...

How does a company map out a winning data analytics strategy? It depends on their end goals. But one thing is certain: no data set is pure rubbish. Even trifles of customer information can morph into an improved product or service. Take the airline industry, for example.  “You need to know everything,” said Phil Wood (pictured, right), ...

Edge to cloud traffic, data inferencing at end points, multicloud computing architectures — they have one harrying problem in common: network latency and the high cost of lugging around data. The solution is a database that can live in many homes at once, according to Patrick McFadin (pictured), vice president of developer relations at DataStax Inc. “Four years ago, when I said your ...

What does the word mainframe bring to mind? An old legacy company that thinks cloud security has more holes than a slice of Swiss cheese? The reality is that many companies running on mainframes are raring to move to cloud. But it’s hard, time-consuming work, and they lack a practical playbook. They need a strategy that ...