A great talk by Andrew Ng ( http://www.andrewng.org/) one of the prominent figures in this field.

Well worth the 30 mins if you have the time.

Some key takeaways for me were:

1. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the new electricity in the sense that it will transform every industry it touches.
2. Tasks taking less than a second for a human can probably be automated with current technologies or will be automated soon (this includes tasks comprised of simpler tasks chained together).
3. The value of a business is in the data not the algorithms; and you don’t need huge amounts of data to get started.
4. Architect the organisation to leverage the capabilities offered by new technologies. A tech company that adds machine learning algorithms is no more an AI company than a retail store adding a website makes it an internet company.
5. In agile internet era companies, decision making power is pushed down to engineers and product managers.
6. Workflows and business processes have to be adapted for the AI era.
7. Companies will benefit (i.e. extract more value) from centralised data repositories.