Over the coming decade artificial intelligence (AI) will add $13 trillion (£11.2 trillion) to the global economy, according to a recent report in Harvard Business Review. The opportunities this presents to businesses are huge and those already using AI are experiencing greater productivity, sustained competitive advantage, and increased sales leads. 

Despite this, many businesses are failing to realise the technology’s full potential, or even try it out at all.

“While there is broad agreement regarding the potential impact of AI, the reality today is that tangible results achieved through AI implementations in most companies have been disappointing,” says Jeff Grisenthwaite, vice president at AI solution provider Catalytic. “Companies are struggling to scale past the pilot phase and the initial handful of high-priority use cases.” 

There’s one key reason for this: Lack of resources. While the majority of organisations recognise that AI can turn their data into value, they don’t have the skills to effectively implement it. This is because traditional AI needs a lot of expertise around machine learning, engineering infrastructure and more.   

This is where AI as a Service (AIaaS) promises to make a difference. In the same way that Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) models have transformed how enterprises purchase and implement technology over the last ten years, AIaaS is expected to become just as widely used. Indeed, according to analysis published in February by Orbis Research, the AIaaS market is expected to see tenfold growth in value over the next five years, increasing from  was already valued at over $2.38 billion (£2.04 billion) in 2019 and is expected to exceed $22 billion (£18.9 billion) by 2025.

Removing roadblocks

AIaaS refers to AI services that are developed by third parties to target specific needs. Thanks to the growth and accessibility of the cloud, providers are able to deliver these AI solutions as a service that can be accessed, refined and expanded in ways that were unfathomable in the past. 

By enabling users to circumvent the prolonged and resource-heavy nature of development, businesses benefit from a quicker, more flexible, and more cost-effective way of working. “AIaaS allows AI to be used by a broader group of people who are not necessarily well-versed in technology,” says Hossein Rahnama, CEO at contextual experience design business Flybits. “When interdisciplinary groups leverage AI with business as a mindset, the impact is going to be much higher.”

Flybits is already reaping these rewards, says Rahnama: “AIaaS enables expedited testing, and a faster time to market. It also allows us to train and find more effective talent at a much faster pace. For example, in the past, I would need to hire someone with a decade of experience. Now, I look for someone who knows how to use the technology tools.”

As well as negating the need to employ specialised talent, AIaaS offers a raft of further benefits. For example, it removes the need for organisations to gather appropriate data, prepare it, and use it to train their software. “An algorithm can only be as successful as the training data it is exposed to,” says Hiten Shah, research analyst in Frost & Sullivan’s TechVision team. “AI algorithms exposed to and trained on a diverse data set which is a true representation of a larger world can be considerably more accurate than algorithms with access to limited data.  With AIaaS, algorithms get deployed in various use cases in different environments and the resulting learning from these deployments enables developers to further develop more complex and accurate algorithms.” 

Another benefit that shouldn’t be underestimated is the potential to democratise AI – AIaaS enables more people to benefit from the technology, regardless of their knowledge and computing infrastructure. “Departments throughout the enterprise will have the ability to infuse AI into their day-to-day work, improving customer experiences, and optimising business outcomes,” says Grisenthwaite. 

AIaaS is best applied into high-volume, digital business processes such as the analysis of documents, emails and other text using natural language processing and optical character recognition. The opportunities here are seemingly endless. “We’re seeing AIaaS adopted across industries to help solve unique business issues and innovate new areas,” says Levent Besik, director of product management for Google Cloud AI. “For example, in the healthcare industry, it is reducing workloads for doctors and nurses by intelligently triaging patients. For media organisations, it is connecting journalists to global audiences with accurate language translation. We’re also seeing customer service teams implement it to reduce customer service wait times and increase customer satisfaction by automatically responding to common requests.”

The New York Times, meanwhile, is using AIaaS to digitise its physical archive of over five million photos. “With Google Cloud, they can securely store their images, easily search for photos, and find new insights from the data locked even on the backs of images,” explains Besik. 

Elsewhere, multinational retailer Walmart is using AIaaS in its Intelligent Retail Lab (IRL), to facilitate the tracking of items and purchases. Out-of-stock notifications will automatically be triggered to internal apps that alert associates when to re-stock.

The democratisation of AI

As the question from customers shifts from how AI works, to what it can do for their business, the technology will continue to transition from an elite niche to a mainstream tool, just like personal computers. This transition will result in a fundamental shift in how builders and businesses develop and deliver products and services. 

According to recent figures from KPMG, it’s expected that by 2022 many companies will devote over half of their AI spend to third-party services with managed services, microservices and application stores being important trends to watch in this space.   

Funding for AI startups is also on the rise. “A look back shows what is, perhaps, the most impressive growth statistic: we’ve seen a 592% increase in funding for AI technologies in only four years,” says Ji Li, data science director at CLARA analytics. “Clearly, this points to an anticipated AIaaS surge as these companies continue to grow and mature, particularly as vertical markets become more comfortable with the AI value proposition.” 

This sets the scene for a very promising future. “As more organisations embark on the journey to get AI into production, more IT leaders will turn to AIaaS to overcome skills and technology gaps,” says Magnus Revang, research vice president at Gartner. “As a result, we expect explosive growth in the next few years. By 2023, over 50% of enterprises will be using AIaaS to enhance their application portfolios, up from less than five percent today. I’m excited to see what this future looks like.”

Google Cloud and Cisco have joined forces to develop the “industry’s first” application-centric multi-cloud networking fabric.

The jointly developed automated solution, called Cisco SD-WAN Cloud Hub with Google Cloud, combines Cisco’s SD-WAN services with Google’s software-defined backbone to ensure application performance is optimized and secured across the enterprise network.

The two firms claim this new service, which is aimed at those who have or are planning to deploy a hybrid multi-cloud strategy, will guarantee applications and networks have shared service-level agreement settings, compliance, and security coverage, as well as provide reliable application performance and optimized user experience.

Google notes that customers will be able to automatically provision a reliable, global network that grows with their businesses needs and be able to publish all of their services in a single place with the ability to define the intent of how the network should treat those services in an automated fashion.

“With tighter integrations between Cisco and Google Cloud, this solution will bring an end-to-end network that adapts to application needs, and that enables secure and on-demand connectivity from a customer’s branch, to the edge of the cloud, through Google Cloud’s backbone, and to applications running in Google Cloud, a private data centre, another cloud or a SaaS application,” said Shailesh Shukla, VP of Products and GM of Networking for Google Cloud.

“We believe by combining the core technology strengths of both Cisco and Google Cloud, we can provide best-in-class, cloud-delivered enterprise networking solutions that make network management easy for our customers and allow them to meet their business needs with agility,” Shukla added.

Cisco and Google Cloud intend to invite select customers to participate in previews of this solution by the end of 2020. General availability is planned for the first half of 2021. To learn more, read Cisco’s blog and visit our partnership website.

The partnership builds on Cisco’s and Google’s earlier efforts to make their products work better together. Back in 2017, the two companies announced a hybrid cloud partnership that will allow IT managers and application developers to use Cisco tools to manage their on-premises environments and link it up with Google’s public IaaS cloud.

On 23 March, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced new measures were being introduced in an attempt to slow down the spread of the highly-infectious COVID-19 virus. Daily life changed from one day to another. As hospitals filled with new patients, offices were abandoned. Restaurants and cafes closed. Many public transport stations became completely empty for the first time in decades, if not centuries. For the employees who have been lucky enough to keep their jobs and work from home, life went on, one way or another.  And while there are many social media posts extolling the virtues of working in tracksuit bottoms all day, other people have found their work/life balance has suffered tremendously. 

To mark the first full month since Britain went into lockdown, we spoke to some workers who are feeling the downsides to working from home and asked why they are looking forward to returning to the office.

Productivity – lost in communication?

Working from home can be isolating, especially for those who are used to spending up to 40 hours a week in a busy environment with an abundance of social interaction. Charlie Worrall, Digital Marketing Executive at web design agency Imaginaire Digital, misses the simplicity of face-to-face communication with colleagues.

“Having never had to work from home before, this has all been a new experience for me. It’s really come to make me appreciate how good our office really is,” Worrall tells IT Pro. From his perspective, shifting the day-to-day conversations to a digital sphere has heavily impacted the quality of communication.

“I find that the simplest of conversations tend to become drawn out, for example, instead of just asking the person next to me a question, I instead use the likes of email, Whatsapp or Slack to contact them. If they don’t reply for a while I might call them and eventually get the answers I needed. All of this just creates an inconvenience, however, I completely understand why we need to go through the process of a lockdown and take social distancing very seriously.”

Kerry Sheahan, Head of Content & PR at FSE Digital, a digital agency specialising in search marketing, counts technical difficulties and the change in coworker interactions as the main downsides to working from home during the lockdown.

“We’re a digital agency, so obviously we’re all well-versed in using digital tools, but sometimes people forget there’s a difference between using digital tools for marketing, and general IT knowledge. I could write you an essay on the intricacies of on-page SEO elements, but if my Outlook stops working I’m FaceTiming our IT guys,” she says.

“The other thing for me, is that while we’re all making an effort to stay connected, you don’t see people’s initial reaction to your ideas. We all tend to be polite over email, and if we jump on a call, we’ve normally had a quick brief on what we’re going to cover. For me, someone’s honest opinions to new marketing ideas we’re bouncing around comes in that split-second reaction they can’t control when you first share your ideas.”

Her colleague, head of SEO Sam Mead, agrees. “Even though we are using technology to stay connected, we’re missing that ability to shout across the office or just approach somebody for an update or catch up. Ultimately this is leading to certain aspects of projects being slowed down, and reducing productivity in some ways,” he says.

Security is everything

According to a new survey from Atlas Cloud, a UK-based managed service provider that specialises in managed cloud services and hosting solutions, more than half of homeworkers (57%) believe their company should be doing more to help them be more productive. While four in five office workers (79%) now based at home believe the lockdown has proven they can work efficiently in such an environment, around a fifth (19%) said they need their company to act urgently to enable them to work productively during the lockdown.

Atlas Cloud CEO, Pete Watson, thinks the current situation is “the largest overnight change in British working habits since the outbreak of the Second World War”. 

“Our research shows that the majority of office workers believe they need more help from their employers to cope with the technological challenges of working from home,” he says. 

A third of workers (34%) said their work was being hampered by the poor performance of their home internet connection, while 24% complained of having to log in to too many separate software packages and apps while working from home. One in five respondents said they could not access the computer files they need while working from home (22%) or complained that the quality of the laptop, desktop or tablet they were using to work on from home was negatively affecting their work productivity (20%).

Using your work tech at home also creates a security nightmare. According to Watson, “office workers may not be working from home as safely, from a business and cyber security [perspective], as they could be”.

A quarter of employees are using a personal laptop for home working, with half of them admitting to storing work files on their personal device, which raises considerable concerns about the security of business information.

Cyber security is an issue that businesses will have to deal with if working from home is here to stay. In only one month, the coronavirus lockdown has already drastically changed the traditional working landscape, showing everyone that a meeting really can be an email. In fact, it might mark the end of office culture as we know it, with employees never returning en masse to their desks. But despite the slog of a commute or annoying lack of soy milk in the cafeteria fridge, many people miss the experience of working together in person: priceless social interactions, a quick nod to approve a decision, the sound of laughter at an inside joke, or some priceless gossip by the coffee machine. Dear Office, we miss you.

SAP will part ways with its co-CEO, Jennifer Morgan, a matter of months after she took up the mantle alongside Christian Klein following the departure of former chief Bill McDermott last October.

The ERP software giant has restructured to adopt a ‘sole CEO model’, which means Morgan, who has been at the company in various capacities since 2004, has been squeezed out. The co-CEO will depart the company on 30 April. 

The changes have come in light of “the current environment” which requires the company to take “swift, determined action” supported by a clear leadership structure.

“With unprecedented change within the world, it has become clear that now is the right time for the company to transition to a single CEO leading the business,” Morgan said. 

“I would like to thank Hasso Plattner for the opportunity to co-lead this great company, and I wish Christian, the Executive Board, and SAP’s talented team much success as they drive the company forward.”

The decision to part ways with the SAP veteran comes amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which is wreaking havoc in all sectors across the global economy, including major IT and tech companies. 

SAP, incidentally, has sustained growth in revenues and profits during the first quarter of 2020, suggesting the sudden move to restructure its leadership is precautionary. The strong showing is headlined by a 7% rise in revenue.

However, the company has conceded the decision to shift its leadership model has come “earlier than planned” as it needs to focus on ensuring continuity, and unambiguous decision-making, during the crisis.

“Throughout SAP’s transformation, Jennifer has always been laser-focused on customers, partners, shareholders and employees,” said sole CEO Christian Klein. 

“It’s thanks to her that we have established a strong position in experience management solutions. I know she will always be a champion of SAP.”

Morgan joined SAP in 2004 and was appointed co-CEO with Klein in October 2019 when McDermott left. He now serves as the chief of the cloud software company ServiceNow.

IBM is withdrawing its full-year guidance for 2020 due to the current coronavirus pandemic and will reassess its position when there is more economic clarity.

The company’s decision comes after reporting a 3.4% drop in revenue for the first quarter of 2020.

Disruption from COVID-19 is the first real test of Arvind Krishna’s leadership since taking over from Ginni Rometty as CEO. The tech giant reported revenues of $21.8 billion (£16.7 billion) shortly before Rometty announced her retirement. On Monday it reported $17.6 billion (14.2 billion) for the first three months of 2020.

The company said it will reassess this position based on “the clarity of the macroeconomic recovery at the end of the second quarter”.

Despite the drop, other elements of IBM’s business performed well. The firm’s cloud and cognitive software saw a 5% increase, with total cloud revenue up 19% to $5.4 billion (£4.4 billion). Similarly, Red Hat revenue also saw an increase of 18%.

“I believe that what we are going through today, with the shift to remote work, automation … will accelerate our client’s shift to hybrid cloud,” Krishna said on a call with Wall Street analysts Monday. “This gives me immense confidence in our future.”

Since its $43 billion acquisition of Red Hat, and the subsequent shift in focus towards hybrid cloud, IBM has seen continued growth in that particular market.

After five consecutive quarters of declining revenue, the final three months of 2019 saw a 0.1 increase largely based on its cloud success. Total cloud revenue for the final quarter of 2019 hit $6.8 billion (£5.5 billion), a rise of 21%.

In the grand scheme of things, IBM is still far behind the likes of AWS and Microsoft for cloud computing revenues, but it is one of the first to release quarterly performance since the pandemic, which could have a big impact on all the major market players.

Microsoft has released an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tool to help developers categorise bugs and features that need to be addressed in forthcoming releases.

The software giant’s machine learning system classifies bugs as security or non-security with a 99% accuracy, and also determines whether a bug is critical or non-critical with a 97% accuracy rating.

With ambitions to build a system with a level of accuracy as close as possible to a security expert, Microsoft fed its machine learning model with bugs labelled as security and non-security. Once this was trained, it could then label data that was not pre-classified. 

“Every day, software developers stare down a long list of features and bugs that need to be addressed,” said Microsoft’s senior security program manager Scott Christiansen, and data and applied scientist Mayana Pereira. 

“Security professionals try to help by using automated tools to prioritize security bugs, but too often, engineers waste time on false positives or miss a critical security vulnerability that has been misclassified.

“At Microsoft, 47,000 developers generate nearly 30 thousand bugs a month. These items get stored across over 100 AzureDevOps and GitHub repositories. To better label and prioritize bugs at that scale, we couldn’t just apply more people to the problem. However, large volumes of semi-curated data are perfect for machine learning.”

Because the system needs to be as accurate as a security expert, security professionals approved training data before this was fed into the machine learning model. Once the model was operational, they were brought back to evaluate the model in production.

The project began with data science and the collection of all data types and sources to evaluate quality. Security experts were then brought in to review the data and confirm the labels assigned were correct. 

Data scientists then chose a modelling technique, trained the model, and evaluated performance. Finally, security experts evaluated the model in production by monitoring the average number of bugs and manually reviewing a random sample.

The mechanism uses a step-step machine learning model operation; first learning how to classify between security and non-security bugs and then to apply a severity rating.

As a result of the level of accuracy, Microsoft now believes it’s catching more security vulnerabilities before they are exploited in the wild.

Development teams can read details in a published academic paper, with the machine learning methodology set to be open-sourced through GitHub in the coming months. 

​Google has added the option for its Gmail business and education users to take calls through its video conferencing tool Meet, following a demand for more secure video conferencing tools.

Google Meet is available only to schools, businesses, and governments, as opposed to its more consumer-focused Hangouts platform, which can be joined by anybody with a Google account.

The integration of Gmail and Meets is the first of several other functionalities that are to be added later this month. Google vice president Javier Soltero told Reuters that the company has also decided to roll out several other features ahead of schedule due to the surge in demand for video conferencing tools.

The move is likely to capitalise on Google’s reputation for providing secure tools, as many are becoming wary of video conferencing security breaches such as ‘Zoom-bombing’.

Meet is also set to offer a Zoom-like layout displaying up to 16 call participants at once, as well as improving video quality in dim lighting and the ability to filter background noise such as keyboard clicks.

Google Meet usage has surged 25 times amid the coronavirus pandemic and earlier this month Soltero revealed that Google Meet was adding over 2 million new users every day.

“They’re spending over 2 billion minutes together – that’s more than 3,800 years of secure meetings in a single day,” he wrote in a blog post.

Google has also announced that it would be extending the free availability of advanced Google Meet video-conferencing capabilities for all G Suite and G Suite for Education customers until 30 September 2020.

This follows the news that Microsoft pledged to work with the 27,000 schools in the UK, helping them run lessons remotely using Microsoft Teams, Office 365, as well as software such as Minecraft: Education Edition, Flipgrid, Skype in the Classroom and InTune.

​Google Cloud has announced that it will be joining a new alliance of data analytics companies that aims to support businesses and governments in recovering from the coronavirus pandemic.

Emer2gent is set to combine traditional economic, business, travel and retail data sets with behaviour and sentiment data, in order to facilitate the global economic recovery from the downturn caused by the coronavirus pandemic. It describes itself as “an alliance of partners sharing data and expertise to build economic resilience”.

Led by Rolls-Royce, it already counts IBM, Leeds Institute for Data Analytics, The Data City, Truata, and ODI Leeds as its members.

Google Cloud is the latest to join the group and will provide its Public Datasets and BigQuery cloud data warehouse, which aims to assist businesses in making informed decisions quickly and ease their transformation.

Google Cloud’s manufacturing and industrial lead for the UK and Ireland, Rajh Das, said that the company is “proud to be involved in such an important project as we all work together to support business globally during these extraordinary times”.

IBM is to provide its public cloud, the IBM Cloud Pak for Data, and high-performance computing, as well as subject matter expertise from its Data Science Elite team.

“IBM looks forward to joining our existing partners and valued clients in this initiative,” said Andrew Brown, general manager for IBM Cloud & Cognitive Software Europe. “It is hoped IBM’s contribution will help accomplish the identification of proven use cases, to assist where recovery indicators emerge for countries, governments, state agencies and supporting companies to best respond to the next phase of the improvement in the pandemic.”

Caroline Gorski, global director for R2 Data Labs, the Rolls-Royce data innovation catalyst behind the alliance, expressed her hopes for the swift recovery of the world economy.

“Our data innovation community can help do this and is at its best when it comes together for the common good,” she said. “People, businesses and governments around the world have changed the way they spend, move, communicate and travel because of COVID-19 and we can use that insight, along with other data, to provide the basis for identifying what new insights and trends may emerge that signify the world’s adjustment to a new normal after the pandemic.”

Google Cloud’s announcement comes a month after the news that the company had joined Lloyd’s digital transformation project which aims to upgrade the UK bank’s IT systems to compete in the increasingly digitised world of finance.

An internal investigation by the Department of Defence (DoD) has found that the decision to award the JEDI contract to Microsoft was administered fairly, despite widespread reports of political interference.

The DoD’s Inspector General sought to review whether the decision to award Microsoft with a $10 billion cloud computing contract had been handled fairly and legally, as well as investigate reports that the White House pressured officials to reject a proposal from Amazon Web Services.

The report found that the process met the DoD’s standards, however, it was unable to review the deal in its entirety due to restrictions imposed by a “presidential communications privilege”.

Since it was first announced, the Joint Enterprise Defence Infrastructure (JEDI) project has been marred in controversy. From its single-vendor nature, to accusations of bias, the bidding process has resulted in extensive legal action. Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched an appeal shortly after Microsoft were announced the winners, citing political influence, particularly that of US President Donald Trump which has been heavily reported.

Oracle, meanwhile, launched legal action in November after it claimed AWS itself had sought to influence the decision, claiming that two DoD officials had been offered jobs at AWS during the process, while a third was a former consultant for the company.

Although the DoD report said that the process had been handled properly, it revealed that several DoD witnesses were instructed by the General Counsel (OGC) of the agency to not answer questions about potential communications between White House and DoD officials regarding JEDI, according to the report.

“As a result, we could not be certain whether there were any White House communications with some DoD officials which may have affected the JEDI procurement,” the report stated.

“However, we believe the evidence we received showed that the DoD personnel who evaluated proposals and made the source-selection awarding Microsoft the JEDI Cloud contract were not pressured about their decision on the award of the contract by any DoD leaders more senior to them, who may have communicated with the White House.”

Media “swirl”

The report states that DoD witnesses were aware of media reports about the JEDI award, but they said they considered it “lobbying,” and “media swirl”. These refer to statements reportedly made by Trump that criticised Amazon and its owner Jeff Bezos. However, the report said that these comments had no effect on the work of each witness.

Instead, the findings suggest that “inaccurate media reports” and stories of “lobbying” from competing cloud companies may have created “the appearance or perception” that the award process was biased.

The report uses the infamous “screw Amazon” quote as an example. According to Guy Snodgrass’ book ‘Holding the Line: Inside Trump’s Pentagon with Secretary Mattis‘, the President directed defence secretary Mark Esper to review the JEDI procurement. According to the DoD, the book speculated that he tried to influence Esper and other DoD officials not to select Amazon. The report also suggests that media reports, singling out CNN, contributed to speculation that Trump may have attempted to influence the procurement against Amazon.

However, the investigation could not corroborate or disprove Snodgrass’ account. Mattis told the investigation he could “not confirm” Snodgrass’ statement and said he did not recall talking to the President about JEDI. Other DoD officials said they “did not recall any meeting like” the one that Snodgrass describes in the book.

The investigation was also unable to fully corroborate or contradict Snodgrass’ account of the small group meeting, as the officials named by Snodgrass were instructed by the OGC to not answer any questions about communications with the President. The report concludes, however, that whether or not the meeting happened as described, it did not influence Mattis’ actions toward the JEDI bidding process.

Standard Chartered has become the first major bank to ban the use of Zoom and Google Hangouts among its employees due to cybersecurity concerns.

In a memo seen by Reuters, CEO Bill Winters told managers not to use the popular video communication services, joining an array of companies and governments who have banned Zoom in the last weeks.

A Standard Chartered spokeswoman told Reuters that cyber security remains a top priority and that staff can use several authorized tools for audio and video conferencing.

Winters’ decision to warn employees against using Google Hangouts is rather unprecedented, as Alphabet’s platform for virtual gatherings has not earned the same reputation for cybersecurity issues as Zoom.

Zoom has been plagued by security concerns since it saw a surge in users following COVID-19 remote working boom. It’s been revealed that the company doesn’t use end-to-end encryption, despite specifically stating that it does on its website, while incidents of ‘Zoom-bombing’ have forced governments, businesses and schools alike to ban the use of the platform.

Last week, Zoom founder Eric Yuan told CNN that the company had “moved too fast” and should have done more to enforce password and meeting room security.

Neither Google Hangouts nor Zoom boasts the same level of encryption as more secure business-oriented communication platforms, such as Cisco WebEx or Microsoft Teams. Two employees who were not authorized to speak on the matter told Reuters that Standard Chartered uses the latter.

However, even the most secure platforms are not immune to security threats. The Cofense Phishing Defense Center recently discovered a new phishing campaign that aims to harvest WebEx credentials using a security warning for the application. The campaign has managed to successfully avert Cisco’s own Secure Email Gateway.

Last month, Microsoft Teams went down across Europe for two hours, causing mass frustration for the many remote workers who had begun remote working amid the coronavirus pandemic. The platform had gained 12 million users in just one week following a surge of remote working.​