Advancements in generative AI significantly reshaped the way businesses operate in 2023. Many HR teams and departments began experimenting with these tools to streamline tasks and improve efficiencies. As we look ahead to 2024, what can we expect from generative AI when it comes to the future of work? We asked six technology experts to share their predictions.

Effective AI Governance Will Be Integral

AI is already embedded into our daily lives in many ways, and we should expect this trend to not only continue, but flourish, in 2024.

According to Gartner research, more than 80% of businesses are set to use Generative AI by 2026.

However, Ed Challis, Head of AI Strategy and General Manager for Communications Mining, UiPath argues that “the ability to deploy the technology responsibly is still largely immature, with concerns from executives around risk and governance.

“2024 will be the year this perception changes and organizations see AI progress from aspiration to implementation,” said Challis. “Effective AI governance is critical for driving strong AI results. If implemented correctly, it can go further than positively affecting productivity and efficiency – it can also enhance an organization’s risk and governance posture.”

AI’s Increasing Importance In Recruitment & Training

When looking at recruitment and training, Merijn te Booij, GM of Workforce Engagement at Genesys believes that AI will be used by companies to transform how they approach training and employee attrition.

“I predict next year we will see generative AI transform employee training and curriculum building,” said te Booij. “Currently, companies deliver standardized training across their workforce or employee segments in like-roles because it’s not scalable to tailor it to individuals. Often, we see the same training applies to senior, long-tenured people-leaders as it does junior-level staffers who are still early in their careers. Generative AI capabilities will vastly reshape how organizations build training personalized to each employee. It will also help organizations automate coaching, making it more efficient to deliver individualized support based on the precise needs of each employee.

In the future, te Booij believes that “organizations will also be able to tap into generative AI to help them predict attrition, retention, and career possibilities. Through more personalized coaching and training, it can provide insights into understanding which employees may leave or who may have higher potential. This will be discerned from signals within conversations, displayed behaviors, and performance, helping organizations understand where their employees fall on the spectrum so they can personalize plans to re-engage them, assign training, and help them advance their careers.”

Pamela Maynard, CEO, Avanade agrees, highlighting the countless benefits of adopting AI within business to streamline recruitment:

“AI allows recruiters to use the power of data to make better decisions, which can include analyzing CVs and job applications as well as assisting with the sourcing and screening of candidates. As AI begins to develop and has more data behind it, the technology can carry out tasks that usually require human intelligence, such as predicting a candidate’s success ahead of hiring and even how they may fit culturally, in an organization.

“With the help of AI in their role, recruiters can be more creative, and innovative and bring bold ideas to their work. With AI on hand to help with administrative tasks, workers can gain around 20 additional hours per week. The recruiting process becomes more time-efficient for recruiters as time-consuming and repetitive tasks such as screening, candidate sourcing, and initial communications can become automated.”

Humanity Is At The Core Of Our AI Innovation Journey

However, with AI permeating into so many of our lives, businesses will find themselves in need of a balance between new technologies and the essential human element. Companies will ponder how best to upskill the workforce alongside advancing technology, for organizational growth.

In line with maintaining the human element, Aaron Skonnard, CEO and Co-Founder of Pluralsight argues that “if you want to get the most out of AI, and any other technology, you need people with the skills to leverage that technology and who have skills across other domains important to your business.

AI can only take an organization so far. It’s the humans powering the technology that will truly drive innovation.

Skonnard also believes that “the next wave of tech learning requires leaders to bring learning directly to their teams, within the flow of work. Learning should become more of a conversation today, where content is the answer to specific questions that arise in the flow of work. Tech learning solutions need to embrace that conversational modality and experience. By making learning a natural part of technologists’ workflow, organizations will naturally begin to see their skills gaps close.”

The Centerpiece Of Leadership Transformation: Putting Employees At The Core

With employee expectations on the rise, we anticipate seeing a paradigm shift towards employee-centric leadership that fosters transparency, work/life balance, and a transformation in organizational strategies to meet these evolving workforce expectations.

Richa Gupta, CHRO, Globalization Partners (G-P) highlights that the future of work is here, but notes it is time for the leaders of the future to stand up and prioritize promoting a flexible workforce to maintain the UK’s position as a leading global economy for the new year.

“Employees expect more from leadership than ever before – more transparency, more commitment to work/life balance, and more willingness to incorporate their sentiments and preferences into the workplace. The mindset has shifted from ‘my paycheque to my purpose’; ‘my boss to my coach’; ‘my annual performance review to ongoing development conversations’. It is not an employer’s market anymore; it’s an employee’s market and workers aren’t afraid to search elsewhere to find a workplace, or leader, that fits their needs.

Gupta believes that in response “there will continue to be not only a transformation of leadership styles but in the overall organization of leadership strategy. Successful leaders will need to prioritize qualities and strategies that promote a flexible and open-minded workforce where credibility, reliability, and trust are paramount.”

Collaborative Teamwork Set To Shift Towards Greater Intentionality

With the evolving challenges that ensue from responsibly navigating the adoption of AI within business, Bryan Stallings, Chief Evangelist, Lucid Software predicts that “2024 will see teams becoming more confident and intentional about increasing the frequency with which they collaborate asynchronously.

“This shift is being driven by firms realizing that endless follow-up and planning meetings are hindering impactful collaboration and productivity. Effective working will continue to be defined by positive outcomes and the journey of how teams achieve those outcomes will be equally important. Additional gains will be realized as teams continue to embrace agile practices, and leverage techniques that help them to align more quickly on a shared vision and collaborate effectively to deliver great results.

Stallings concludes that as this future of work continues to take shape over the next twelve months, we will soon be saying, “How did we ever work any other way?”

A Glimpse Into 2024

As seen in 2023, it’s clear AI is reshaping the workforce of the future. 2024 will likely continue to bring surprising developments in AI applications, presenting new opportunities for companies to enhance employee support, whilst also streamlining processes.

However, the impact of AI on the world of work in 2024 and beyond is still unfolding. Business leaders must seize the moment here to implement upskilling initiatives, so employees have access to effective and continuous tech training regimes that will boost their familiarity with the integral tools moulding the future of work.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]

The post Experts Discuss HR & Future Of Work Predictions For 2024 appeared first on AiThority.

Hi Hendrik, welcome to AiThority.com’s Predictions Series. Please tell us about the evolution and ever-changing role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities in sales enablement.

I think Sales enablement companies are taking AI to the next level already. 

As buyers get smarter with more information at their fingertips, sellers will need to leverage AI to keep up. 2023 was undoubtedly the year in which AI entered the mainstream consciousness, but the nuances and the advantages that AI can offer in a business environment, are still being worked out.

To maximize the almost unlimited possibilities that AI can offer, sellers will need to harness it in their sales meetings to drive better buyer interactions, stay one step ahead and be ready to add meaningful value to the conversation.

Whether it’s using AI to instantaneously surface the most compelling pitch deck, talk track, or playbook, AI will enable sellers to show up as trusted advisors, earning buyer confidence and becoming indispensable to the customer journey. In addition to sales meetings, AI will also be leveraged to augment the role of the internal sales coach, making sales development programs smarter and more scalable. The latest innovations mean that AI can provide actionable insights on seller skills and behaviors, helping define a baseline for sales readiness, and deliver targeted support to the reps who need it most. And if you’re not integrating AI into your sales strategy, you will be opening yourself up to a brief creep from your competitors.

With AI, can we finally expect alignment between Sales and Marketing functions? 

Yes, we can finally see a better alignment between Sales and Marketing using AI.

For years businesses have tried and failed [epically] to align sales and marketing teams. In a recent survey, approximately 70% of organizations said their sales-marketing alignment was not very good, leading to frustration and finger-pointing. However, new enablement platforms coupled with AI will finally make this a reality. When sales and marketing teams can better align, they can sustain and nurture relationships with buyers.

Alignment will also ensure maximized revenue and growth opportunities for the business.

Bringing sales and marketing teams together will allow them to collaborate on key business goals and see how each department impacts the other.

Customers will be delighted when their needs are anticipated, understood, and managed in real time.

With alignment, there will be more rapid deal cycles as customers are engaged and ready to buy.

What avatar would the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions take in 2024?

According to me, CRMs would evolve into Sales Enablement Platforms (SEPs).

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Enablement Platforms (SEP) are both crucial tools in the modern sales and marketing landscape, but they serve distinct functions. While CRM systems were about managing customer relationships and data, the reality is they have become more about customer record management. Meanwhile, sales enablement platforms are about empowering sales teams to engage more effectively with those customers.

In today’s world, businesses need a system of engagement to complement their system of record, and this has made Sales Enablement technology a must-have. Put simply, it is where the relationships happen. CRM systems are designed to manage interactions with current and potential customers, tracking the history of customer engagements, sales opportunities, and service requests. They are invaluable for maintaining detailed records of customers and long-term relationship building.

On the other hand, SEPs focus on equipping revenue enablement teams with the tools, content, and information needed to sell more effectively. These platforms provide resources like sales training materials, content management, and analytics tools to optimize the sales process.

It’s only a matter of time until SEPs outweigh CRMs in importance and additive value.

Recommended AI ML Article: State of Implementation of Generative AI (Gen AI) in Marketing

Thank you, Hendrik! That was fun and we hope to see you back on AiThority.com soon.

[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]

• About Hendrik Isebaert
• About Showpad

About Hendrik Isebaert

Hendrik Isebaert is Showpad’s Chief Executive Officer. After joining the organization in 2016, Hendrik embarked on an extensive business immersion, working in leadership positions across Showpad’s dual headquarters in the U.S. and Belgium.

Beginning his Showpad career as Chief of Staff, Hendrik was subsequently promoted to the role of Managing Director for Europe, Middle East and Africa, and latterly to Senior Vice President of Revenue globally.

About Showpad

Showpad is a leading sales enablement platform.

The post AiThority Interview with Hendrik Isebaert, CEO at Showpad appeared first on AiThority.

Hi, Matt Carter. What are your predictions for the hybrid work environments and the factors that influence business processes?

Matt Carter: The new year will be the most unpredictable yet due to the global economy, politics, increasing threats, etc. So, adopt an attitude and approach that is able to adapt. Maintain the headroom for this.

Initially a stepping stone to a return to the office, hybrid work environments are no longer seen as transitory but rather an expected flexibility to the benefits of both employees and organizations. Organizations are now aware that employees can remain productive working from home, though access to office space is still valuable. Of course, the nature of each company varies greatly. That said, we expect to see hybrid work environments endure. Organizations will need to retain the ability to offer a scalable hybrid offering, rather than a temporary one, with continual investment in technologies that improve the capability, connectivity, and security for those working away from the office.

How should businesses prepare for the uncertain times in 2023?

Matt: In tumultuous times, the ability for organizations to predict the future of the market decreases, while the need for adapting and reacting increases. The uncertainty of what 2023 may bring is disconcerting but recognizable at this point. The future will show that those organizations that remain nimble, grant room for pivoting, and adopt an attitude and approach that emphasizes adaptability, will be positioned to succeed through these uncertain times.

Hi, Dennis. You are an expert in cybersecurity. What are your predictions for the IT industry in 2023?

Dennis Monner:  The continued growth in cyberattacks is apparent and shows no signs of slowing down. Compounded with unsteady economic headwinds, each successful and costly cyberattack will prove increasingly devastating as margins tighten. Enterprises will put additional focus, and subsequent investment, in protecting their global infrastructure from asymmetric threats in hopes of reducing harm when attacks occur and shoring up business resilience.

What about the vulnerabilities that impact physical assets?

Dennis: There is an unmistakable vulnerability inherent in the physical assets that make up an organization’s network infrastructure. While not unique to the present moment, recent events have exposed these vulnerabilities to both natural and man-made disasters by way of extreme weather, viral outbreaks, supply chain fragility and escalating state warfare.

Enterprises will make major investments in the dynamic relocation of physical assets to areas of relative security in the face of this growing risk.

What is the future of Zero-trust security?

Dennis: Zero trust security is going from a period of conceptualization to implementation, from the abstract to the specific. As zero trust grows in importance and delivers tangible value in keeping enterprise networks secure, it will lead to a better understanding of zero trust as a model among decision makers. This shared understanding will lead to further, more meaningful implementation through multiple layers of enterprise networks. 

Hi Renuka. Your take on the political realities and the future of data sovereignty?

Renuka Nadkarni: There will be a renewed focus on addressing potential WAN fragmentation due to political realities, and how to handle end-to-end applications and data, given current and upcoming regulations. Organizations will prioritize working with providers who understand this, as well as growing data sovereignty requirements.

How should businesses align their digital transformation goals with remote workforce requirements?

Renuka: The dust has far from settled in the sprint for digital transformation among enterprises worldwide. Enterprises have made great strides to transform to meet the fundamental changes in the day-to-day operations of their workforces, as well as the world around them. While the pandemic put the need for digital transformation front and center for decision makers, it is apparent that digital transformation is a never-ending process. Enterprises will continue to closely evaluate different models of operation for their organizations and will ultimately adopt the technologies that facilitate this transformation most seamlessly.

Can AI  and machine learning be expected to close talent gap in your industry?

Renuka: With AI and ML proving to be increasingly reliable and even surpassing expectations in real world deployments across industries, AI/ML will make another major leap next year in the form of mainstream trust and heavier investments from organizations. With the talent gap remaining a major obstacle to overcome throughout IT departments, organizations will need to make the most of the information they have access to. Aggregate WAN data gives incredible insights into the traffic patterns and bandwidth of enterprise networks and presents a key source for overcoming the IT talent gap. Enterprises will leverage this aggregate WAN data in AIOps deployments to automate intensive tasks where possible, optimizing network performance and alleviating IT teams to focus on more meaningful tasks. 

Hi DeAndra Jean-Louis. Please tell us your relationship with SASE and how it benefits the CIOs.

DeAndra: There are a multitude of service providers competing for a piece of the SASE pie, however they all differ in what they’re offering to the market. While enterprises hope to benefit from the true promise of SASE, CIOs will be faced with the difficult task of assessing SASE providers to determine which ones will meet their expectations. Considering these challenges, organizations that are most diligent in their search, will see the greatest benefits. Those who are quicker to pull the trigger will often find that they don’t get what they thought they were paying for.

DeAndra: While there is an emphasis on investment in IT training and education to meet the growing needs throughout the industry, the talent gap that exists is now undeniable. As such, DIY in-house approaches are becoming increasingly expensive, if not completely unfeasible, in meeting the growing needs of complex networks which require cutting-edge solutions. Given this reality, enterprises will continue to see managed offers more favorably and to make up for the lack of in-house talent. It will also enable them to gain the benefits of complicated solutions within their enterprises without the timing, budget, and skills risks that come with implementing them on their own.

What do you think about moving ahead with the vendor-centric SASE adoption and deployment in 2023?

DeAndra: Customers will begin tearing down their internal silos that inhibit full single-vendor SASE adoption. While networking and security teams have traditionally operated separately, more organizations will move towards convergence. Bringing these functions together will enable organizations to maximize the impact of their existing technology assets and will allow their SASE solutions to perform at their best.

Thank you, everyone! That was fun and we hope to see you back on AiThority.com soon.

• About Matt Carter
• About Dennis Monner
• About Renuka Nadkarni
• About DeAndra Jean-Louis
• About Aryaka

About Matt Carter

Matt is a cloud and technology industry veteran, leading Aryaka’s long-term market strategy and day-to-day operations, while guiding the company’s vision for an increasingly connected world.

Prior to this role, Matt served as President and CEO of Inteliquent Inc, a publicly traded provider of cloud-based networking services for global enterprises, which was successfully acquired by GCTR, a Chicago based PE firm.

Matt previously held a series of executive positions with Sprint Corporation where he successfully led several of its major businesses. This includes serving as President of the Sprint Enterprise Solutions business that provided a diversified portfolio of communication platforms to companies in over 165 countries globally. He also served as President of Boost Mobile, a leading provider of no contract wireless services.

About Dennis Monner

Jen Grant is the CEO of Turbo Systems. She has spent the last 15 years building companies from the ground up and taking multiple companies to over a billion-dollar valuation. As CMO, Jen Grant led Looker’s marketing until the 2.6B acquisition by Google in 2019, led the rebrand of Elastic and built the team that took the company public for 2.4B in 2018, and grew Box from a small start-up to an industry-leading enterprise content company with a 1.7B IPO in 2015. Prior to that, Grant spent 4 years at Google leading the Google Apps EDU, Gmail, and Book Search marketing teams. She holds an MBA from Wharton and a BA from Princeton.

About Renuka Nadkarni

Renuka Nadkarni is a security veteran with 20 years of experience building new businesses startups or new businesses at large, publicly traded companies. Before joining Aryaka, she held CTO, Security position at F5 Inc. where she was instrumental in driving F5’s foray into the security market. Previously, she has held various positions and built cutting-edge cloud and security products and launching new businesses at F5, VMware, Infoblox and launching startups. She holds an MS in Electric Engineering from the University of Houston and a BS in Electric Engineering from the University of Mumbai.

About DeAndra Jean-Louis

DeAndra is a transformational leader with over 25 years of experience from a variety of technology sectors including cloud-software, services, hardware, and networking technology. She has built and transformed global enterprise businesses using a customer first-approach. Before joining Aryaka, she was Vice President of Customer Success at Palo Alto Networks where she led the transformation of the Customer Success practice for the company’s largest product segments. Prior to joining Palo Alto Networks, DeAndra held various leadership roles at Workday during a 9-year span, including vice president of EMEA Services (professional services, customer success, services-sales, and partner development). In addition to Workday, DeAndra also held a variety of leadership roles at Anaplan and IBM.

DeAndra serves on the board of Career Girls, a non-profit organization focused on ensuring every girl around the world has access to diverse and accomplished women role models. She is a lifelong advocate for girls in STEM and holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from Louisiana State University. She has lived and worked in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.

About Aryaka

Aryaka is the leader in fully managed SD-WAN and Unified SASE solutions and the first to deliver a Zero Trust WAN based on a Unified SASE architecture. A Gartner “Voice of the Customer” leader, Aryaka meets customers where they are to help them overcome their network and security challenges with ease and an excellent customer experience. Aryaka’s flexible architecture and all-in-one service are designed to modernize enterprises of any size, enabling them to defy convention and future-proof their businesses. The company’s customer base is comprised of hundreds of global enterprises, including several in the Fortune 100.

The post Predictions Series 2022: AiThority Interview with CXOs at Aryaka, a Leader in SASE Solutions appeared first on AiThority.

Four New Reports Dive into the Power of Data, Cloud Acceleration, Ransomware and More

Splunk Inc. the data platform leader for security and observability, released four 2022 Predictions reports detailing the importance of data and how it will underpin every aspect of the future. Based on insights from Splunk senior leaders and technology experts, the report editions identify trends across four key areas: Executive and Emerging Technologies, Data Security, IT and Observability, and Public Sector.

Recommended AI News: UpGrad Inc. Announces Partnership With University Of Maryland For Data Science And Business Analytics Program

“Technology continues to provide us with a unique ability to address many of the global economy’s challenges — and by leveraging the power of data, we can take immediate action to create solutions,” said Teresa Carlson, President and Chief Growth Officer, Splunk. “Over the next year, data will be at the forefront in empowering leaders to rapidly innovate and bring groundbreaking ideas to market in a hybrid and multi-cloud world.”

The Splunk 2022 predictions spotlight the power of data, cloud acceleration, the customer journey and more:

Executive and Emerging Technologies Report

• As businesses find their (post?) pandemic balance, expect an M&A bonanza. Companies that were able to significantly reinvest during the downturn have become more agile. And as organizations come out of the pandemic, those in industries hit hard will bounce back; however, among those, it’s the companies that invested in their digital strategies that will get stronger, while those with less aggressive strategies will really struggle.
• Every organization will need a new approach to talent. COVID-19 accelerated workforce change just as it turbocharged digital transformation. There’s new urgency, and new need, to promote employee well-being while aligning a remote workforce future with new ways of working.
• Edge computing will have big buzz in 2022 — and will live up to the hype. The major cloud providers are making strategic bets on edge architects, and it will become a natural extension of enterprise environments. Edge computing will be enabled by 5G and growing compute power.

Data Security Report

• Ransomware will increase as cybercriminals professionalize and leverage the supply chain. Ransomware is the biggest security threat to most organizations. As bad as the prominent ransomware and supply chain attacks of the past couple of years have been, they’ll be worse together. Planning for the inevitability of ransomware attacks is essential to reducing the time and cost of recovery.
• Additional large breaches are likely to occur, and cyber hygiene will be an organization’s best defense. COVID-19 extended every enterprise through its employees’ home Wi-Fi setup; now basic security diligence is the new perimeter. Consistent security practices including multifactor authentication, full patching and asset identification can help prevent major breaches.

Recommended AI News: Okcoin Announces $1M Commitment To Bring More Women Into Crypto, Randi Zuckerberg As Inaugural Brand Advisory Council Member

IT and Observability Report

• Pandemic-driven cloud acceleration left serious gaps in customer experience. Observability will become essential for organizations looking to understand how their complex webs of cloud services are actually performing, providing teams with the ability to observe, understand and act on their data to improve the customer journey.
• Observability and AIOps will converge to unlock increased value. The inextricable link between observability and AIOps will become commonplace by the end of 2022 as organizations increasingly recognize the importance of taking action on observability, and their data, with machine learning when critical issues occur.

Public Sector Report

• Public and private sector collaboration will be vital for long-term success. As we continue to enhance our nation’s security posture, it is imperative to take a whole-of-nation approach to defend against the most significant cyber threats, including threats to critical infrastructure. Combining industry and government efforts on planning, threat analysis, and defensive operations is the most effective way to combat cyber threats, including nation-state attacks. The cyber threat landscape is simply too vast, and evolving too quickly, for anyone to go it alone. Only through strong, consistent public-private partnerships can we hope to stay ahead of the threat.

Recommended AI News: Genesys Continues Momentum For Employee Engagement With Recognition As A Leader In Workforce Optimization (WFO) By Independent Research Firm

The post Splunk 2022 Predictions Spotlight A Data-Driven Future appeared first on AiThority.

IT, security, and development teams mitigate cloud risk and defend evolving attack surfaces with hacker-powered security

HackerOne, the world’s most trusted hacker-powered security platform, is enhancing its product capabilities to help global organizations easily scale their security and mitigate security risks where traditional security tools fall short. HackerOne has seen a 310% increase in reports for misconfiguration on the HackerOne platform and predictions from Gartner indicate 95% of cloud security issues will be the direct result of misconfiguration by 2022. Applications built on cloud infrastructure services are complex and change constantly, which makes securing cloud workloads and services at scale nearly impossible when relying on disparate tooling. HackerOne’s new set of product capabilities provide organizations the visibility, context, and on-demand access to skilled security experts required to secure cloud workloads, investigate anomalous activity or meet compliance requirements all in one place.

These latest developments provide organizations across industries and attack surfaces with access to a suite of tools to:

• Secure the design, development, and deployment of applications with:
  • HackerOne Assessments: From web applications to mobile to application program interfaces (APIs) to cloud to network security, HackerOne Assessments go beyond automated tools and processes. Organizations can determine the scope of the assessment and recruit researchers with specific skills.
  • HackerOne vulnerability insights: Leverage this hacker-powered vulnerability intelligence tool to get a snapshot of risk during a given time, track key areas within vulnerability lifecycles, and benchmark results against past tests and industry peers.
• Accelerate vulnerability discovery, prioritization, and remediation with:
  • Advanced workflows: Plan, build, test, manage, and evolve workflows with custom triggers, tailored recommendations, and intelligent pattern matching. HackerOne advanced workflows empower customers to create automated processes that trigger actions based on the criticality of vulnerabilities, along with bi-directional syncs that update data and records between key platforms including GitHub, Jira, ServiceNow, Microsoft Azure DevOps and the rest of their tech stack, and more.
  • Remediation guidance: Access remediation advice for each vulnerability found to aid in understanding and resolving of vulnerability reports.
• Bolster program efficiencies with:
  • Attestation reports: With the expanded suite of controls in NIST 800-53 Revision 5, organizations are now required to present evidence of a functional vulnerability disclosure process to maintain compliance. Attestation reports make that a single click for your compliance team. Customers can view program metrics with comprehensive reports to uncover mean time to remediation (MTTR), level of vulnerability criticality, and prove compliance.
  • Embedded submission forms: Enterprise clients will now have the ability to white label their embedded submission forms to seamlessly integrate their Vulnerability Disclosure Program (VDP) into their brand experience.
  • Hacker custom fields: Achieve the flexibility to add additional fields and customize submission forms to collect more information from researchers, including version numbers, browser used, IP address, and more.
  • Hacker communication: Improve hacker communication with video capture capabilities that allow researchers to provide contextual, reproducible steps to help validate vulnerabilities and remediations. For organizations with strict regulatory or privacy requirements, HackerOne Clear provides vetted and background checked researchers.
  • Hacker collaboration: Enable multiple hackers to work together on reports, increasing the likelihood of valid submissions in cloud infrastructure, severe findings, and higher bounties for hackers.

Recommended AI News: BC Platforms Partners with TripleBlind to Power Federated Artificial Intelligence (AI) Data Privacy Approaches

“HackerOne has been in our security arsenal for quite some time,” said Dr. Jasyn Voshell, Director of Product Security at Zebra Technologies. “Working with HackerOne, we have had a solid return on investment while reducing risk. Zebra has scaled our security program across the different product offerings within HackerOne from security assessments for product releases, bug bounty for continuous testing, and a mechanism for third-party security researchers to submit vulnerabilities. The ability to log into a platform portal, receive a notification when a vulnerability is reported, and remediate bugs in the same workflow allows us to be efficient in our approach to risk management.”

“Organizations are migrating to the cloud at a faster pace than ever before,” said HackerOne Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder Alex Rice. “Promises of increased speed and agility powered by the latest technology are driving the need for security to adapt to new digital business demands.”

Recommended AI News: Imvision Joins the Boomi Technology Partner Program, Provides Customers with Advanced API Security

In fact, according to recent research, public cloud spending is expected to grow from $229 billion in 2019 to $500 billion in 2023. Yet, 99 percent of cloud security failures will be the buyer’s fault, meaning cloud administrators are now expected to know how cloud security services work, configure them correctly, and maintain their cloud deployments.

“With adoption comes risk,” Rice continues. “And the key to defending against evolving threats is speed. Limiting the time of exposure and reducing mean time to detect and respond is integral to protecting everyone’s data as it moves to the cloud. Hackers empower you to do just that.”

Recommended AI News: Hexnode is Now a Samsung Knox Validated Partner

The post HackerOne’s Continuous Security Testing Platform Helps Detect, Remediate, and Analyze Cloud Misconfigurations for Global Organizations appeared first on AiThority.

This AiThority.com primer on what are RegTech definitions to deep-dive into the world currently disrupted by new emerging technologies.

In the last 10 years or so, global financial institutions and regulatory bodies have come together to unleash a battery of regulations for Banking, Insurance, and Micro-economies. The advancement of new technologies such as AI, Machine Learning Engineering, Big Data, Cloud and Edge Computing, Blockchain and Crypto, and low-code DevOps, have heavily disrupted the RegTech industry.

This primer dives deep into the world of Regulatory Tech, or RegTech which is disrupted by the new emerging technologies. But, first, let’s learn some basic definitions and industry trends.

Recommended RegTech Blog: Davos 2020: Delegates at World Economic Forum Urged to Commit to Fintech

The Best-5 RegTech Definitions by the Analysts 

In a recent blog, Brian Clark, CEO of Ascent had said that RegTech is slated to become mainstream, even as early adopters begin “to see the actual, tangible benefit” these RegTech tools can provide. We would expand the RegTech horizon by virtue of their direct impact on AML/ CFT frameworks within the current Fintech landscape.

European Banking Authority

According to the EBA, the RegTech perimeter is part of the overall Fintech framework. This Fintech framework also includes other tools and technologies such as AI ML engineering, Sandboxes, Cybersecurity, Consumer data management, and Compliance assessment.

As a standalone technology, RegTech can be defined as a set of tools used in the AML/ CFT operations. AML is Anti-Money Laundering; CFT is Combating the Financing of Terrorism.

These tools are used to automate one or more of these activities –

• Compliance
• Identity and Access Management and Control
• Risk Management
• Risk Reporting
• Transaction Monitoring
• Trading and Auditing

Together with Supervisory Technology (or, SupTech), and AML/ CFT, RegTech raises the bar in combating financial crimes at various levels, globally and locally.

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) 

UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) coined RegTech as a term in 2015. It defined RegTech as “a subset of fintech that focuses on technologies that may facilitate the delivery of regulatory requirements more efficiently and effectively than existing capabilities.”

Today, the broad-spectrum definition of RegTech covers all ‘new technologies that facilitate the delivery of regulatory requirements in the financial world.”

The Institute of International Finance (IIF)

The Institute of International Finance (IIF) and its Members have defined RegTech as “the use of new technologies to solve regulatory and compliance requirements more effectively and efficiently” has enormous potential to enable better compliance solutions, increasing efficiency, profitability and reducing barriers to entry to the sector.”

IBM Financial Services

IBM provides AI-powered RegTech capabilities for risk and compliance management.

According to IBM, RegTech is defined as “The application of new technologies to help banks and other financial institutions meet these activities –

• Regulatory monitoring,
• Reporting,
• Compliance, and
• Risk management challenges.

RegTech helps firms effectively manage regulatory compliance and cut compliance-related costs.

Deloitte Insights

According to Deloitte, RegTech is derived from and heavily inclined to its “big brother” Fintech.

RegTech is defined as the use of innovative technology to improve the compliance and delivery of regulations. RegTech solutions aim to provide “a nimble, configurable, easy to integrate, reliable, secure and cost-effective regulatory solutions”.

In a report, Deloitte provides a more refined definition based on its innovative application in various financial operations. It states that –

“RegTech offers banks automated solutions that can speed up the cumbersome process of vetting clients and transactions, which is necessary to prevent money laundering and other financial crimes.”

RegTech is the use of innovative technology to improve the compliance and delivery of regulations.

Raconteur

According to Raconteur, RegTech providers are duly authorized to provide the banks, insurers and investment institutions with automation technology to keep them “on top of compliance” and prevent attracting heavy fines for non-adherence.

So, in general, we can simply answer to “What is RegTech?” in these words –

 RegTech solutions are regulation-driven data and analytics platforms to efficiently and effectively streamline any FinTech business to comply with regulatory requirements.

RegTech Trends and their Impact on the Fintech Market

From being a promising sector in 2015, the RegTech market has rapidly grown into a major Fintech-enabler to tackle modern issues related to an uncertain macroeconomic and financial environment that is putting pressure on the fintech sector’s profitability.

FinTech Predictions: The Future of Fintech at CES 2020 with AI, Crypto, Threat Intelligence and So Much More…

• The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has also underlined RegTech’s importance in today’s economy. IMF clearly indicates a common concern about cybersecurity, money laundering, and payment services and a need for greater international cooperation in Fintech.

RegTech definitions would continue to evolve, based on their market penetration.

IMF sees Europe as a leader in RegTech delivery and adoption. In the future, Africa and Asia would generate a large volume of RegTech demands, leading RegTech vendors to encourage fintech innovation and explore regulatory responses proactively in these continents.

• In 2018, companies have been penalized $26 billion in fines. These had been imposed for non-compliance with Anti-Money Laundering (AML), Know Your Customer (KYC) and sanctions regulations in the last decade. The highest single fine ever levied against a bank by one regulator – $8.9 billion! (Fenergo)
• 77% expect to adopt blockchain as part of an in-production system or process by 2020; SaaS-enabled RegTech adoption by banks will grow at nearly 20% per year, according to Gartner.
• Local challenges resulting from corporate data breaches, consumer privacy concerns, and a wave of new GDPR-like regulations ( such as the CCPA and the China Password Law) would create demand for technology tools that help enterprises meet compliance challenges.
• Mexico had passed the Fintech Act in 2018. We can expect many countries to follow the provisions laid down in The Mexico Fintech Act as issued on 9 March 2018.
• According to Accenture, the global RegTech market revenue at $2.3 billion for 2018. By 2023, the RegTech market is projected to reach $7.2 billion by 2023, growing at more than 25% CAGR between 2020 and 2023.
• Forrester is expecting RegTech investments to double-up in 2020. In the first three quarters of 2019, the RegTech industry witnessed a 103% growth YoY.
• According to a leading Fintech market reporting firm, RegTech will be heavily disrupted by Data Analytics (62%) and AI (62%). Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Distributed Ledger, and Cloud Computing would continue to accelerate the Fintech/RegTech adoption in the next 2-3 years.

According to IBM, AI and Machine Learning are a game-changer for RegTech and the Financial Services industry.

IBM stated –

“Much like how AI systems help oncologists determine the best cancer treatments, financial institutions can now be armed to make more informed decisions to manage risk and compliance processes and obligations.”

• Blockchain is a key RegTech-enabler in the industry. According to the Consultancy Quinlan & Associates, blockchain, could cut the costs that banks incur to comply with anti-money laundering rules by $4.6 billion a year – or 32 percent of current annual costs – through RegTech adoption.
• Other interesting technologies that could help RegTech gather momentum in the next 5 years include Face Recognition (to detect deep-fakes), AR VR, Voice detection, and Natural Language Processing. Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Image Processing, and Neural Networking platforms could also be associated with RegTech growth.
• New banking applications such as Behavioral biometrics for both Online (web) and, Mobile banking, Social engineering, and IoT could pose unique challenges to the Fintech market. RegTech framework would enable companies to successfully wade through these challenges.

In 2020, we should expect RegTech to move beyond mere automation and account verification processes.

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RegTech definitions would get more teeth as we see larger fintech companies adopting RegTech to ultimately speed up the cumbersome Fintech process of vetting millions of accounts in real-time, perform an advanced risk assessment and target money laundering and other financial crimes with better use of Predictive Analytics and Preventive Intelligence.

RegTech Solutions 

• AlgoDynamix
• Elliptic
• Fenergo
• Veridate
• FixNix
• Rubrik
• Netskope
• IBM RegTech
• Verafin
• Virtusa xLabs
• Wipro HOLMESTM

(Please write to us at sghosh@martechseries.com to share your RegTech definitions, insights, opinions and start-up stories in RegTech applications)

The post AiThority.com Primer on What is RegTech: Definitions, Stats and Tools appeared first on AiThority.

Cyberthreats are getting sophisticated affecting not just corporates but also domestic lives. Drone-led espionage, spear-phishing emails, ransomware hacks, and VPN attacks have become the new normal in digital existence. A few hours left for the year 2020 to end, what does 2021 look like in the battle against cyberthreats? It has been a phenomenal year for cybercriminals who raked up billions from ransomware and stealing data for the dark web. The cyber attacks targeting businesses and domestic gadgets (IoT devices and smartphones) are likely to get more vigorous and frequent in 2021, resulting in more costly mitigation and risk assessment of cyber threat intelligence platforms. In a recent conversation with the WatchGuard’s C-suite leadership, we investigated the top cyberthreats and the company’s plans to empower their customers against these threats. Here is a list of predictions that WatchGuard provided.

Automation Drives Tidal Wave of Spear Phishing Campaigns

Spear phishing is an attack technique that involves highly targeted and convincing malicious emails that include specific and accurate details about a particular individual or role at a company. Historically, spearfishing is a high-investment and potentially high-return activity for hackers that has required manual and time-consuming processes.

That will change in 2021. Cybercriminals have already started to create tools that can automate the manual aspects of spear phishing. By combining such tools with programs that scan data from social media networks and company websites, phishers can send thousands of detailed, believable spear-phishing emails, with content customized to each victim. This will dramatically increase the volume of spear-phishing emails attackers can send at once, which will improve their success rate. On the bright side, these automated, volumetric spear-phishing campaigns will likely be less sophisticated and easier to spot than the traditional, manually generated variety.

Regardless, you should expect a major increase in spear-phishing attacks in 2021 due to automation. What’s worse, bad actors know that anxiety and uncertainty make victims easier to exploit. As society continues to grapple with the impact of COVID-19, global political strife, and general financial insecurity in 2021, we anticipate that many of these automated spear-phishing attacks will prey on fears around the pandemic, politics, and the economy.

Cloud-Hosting Providers Finally Crack Down on Cyber Abuse 

Phishing attacks have come a long way from the 419 “Nigerian Prince” scams of old. Threat actors now have an abundance of tools to help them craft convincing spear-phishing emails that trick victims into giving up credentials or installing malware. Lately, we’ve seen them leverage Cloud hosting to piggyback on the otherwise good reputation of Internet giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

Most Cloud-hosting services like Azure and AWS offer Internet-accessible data storage where users can upload anything they’d like, from database backups to individual files, and more. These services are exposed to the Internet through custom subdomains or URL paths on prominent domains such as cloudfront.net, windows.net, and googleapis.com. Threat actors commonly abuse these features to host website HTML files designed to mimic the authentication form of a legitimate website like Microsoft365 or Google Drive and to steal credentials submitted by unsuspecting victims.

This style of phish is effective because the email links to spoofed forms that resemble legitimate Microsoft, Google, or Amazon AWS links with domains owned by those companies. In 2021, we predict that these Cloud-hosting providers will begin heavily cracking down on phishing and other scams by deploying automated tools and file validation that spot spoofed authentication portals.

Homes and Devices: Hackers Infest Home Networks with Worms

The pandemic forced us all to adopt remote work practically overnight, and the era of home-based workforces will continue through 2021 and beyond. As a result, cybercriminals change their approach and create attacks specifically targeting the home worker.

Malicious hackers often include worm functionality modules in their malware, designed to move laterally to other devices on a network. In 2021, cybercriminals will exploit under-protected home networks as an avenue to access valuable corporate endpoint devices. By deliberately seeking out and infecting the company-owned laptops and smart devices on our home networks, attackers could ultimately compromise corporate networks. Next year we expect to see malware that not only spreads across networks but looks for signs that an infected device is for corporate use (such as evidence of VPN usage).

Booby-trapped Smart Chargers Lead to Smart Car Hacks 

Smart cars keep getting smarter and more common, with more manufacturers releasing new models every year. Security researchers and black hat hackers alike are paying attention. Although we’ve seen plenty of interesting smart car security research in recent years, there hasn’t been a major hack for quite some time. In 2021, we believe the dearth of major smart car attacks will be broken and a hacker will leverage smart chargers to do it.

Consumers and Business Owners are Underprepared for Evolving Cyberthreats

As with chargers for our mobile phones and other connected devices, smart car charging cables carry more than just energy. Although they don’t transfer data in the same way phone chargers do, smart car chargers do have a data component that helps them manage charging safety. In the world of mobile phones, researchers and hackers have proven they can create booby-trapped chargers that take advantage of any victim who plugs in.

We expect to see security researchers find similar vulnerabilities in smart car charging components that could at the very least allow them to prevent the powering and use of your car, and perhaps demo a malicious smart car charger during 2021. If proven, an attack like this could even result in car ransomware that prevents your car from charging until you pay.

Users Revolt Over Smart Device Privacy  

Smart and connected devices are pervasive in our lives.

Digital assistances such as Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri are watching and listening to everything happening in our homes, and products like Furbos even watch and listen to our pets. Smart home systems add value and convenience to our lives by automating our lights, room temperatures, the locks on our doors, and more. We even have virtual reality (VR) systems that 3D map our rooms with specialized cameras and require a social media account to operate. Finally, many of us have adopted wearables that track and sense critical health parameters, such as how often we move, our heartbeat, our EKG, and now even our blood oxygen levels. Add to this the machine learning (ML) algorithms tech companies employ to correlate the big data from users, and it’s clear that companies know more about our private lives than our closest friends. Some of these companies may even understand our psychology and behaviors more than we do ourselves.

While all these technologies certainly have very useful and beneficial capabilities, society is starting to realize that giving corporations that much insight into our lives is not healthy.

Worse yet, we are also starting to learn that the data mapping algorithms tech companies use to categorize us, and to quantify and analyze our actions, can have unintended consequences for all of society. That’s why users will finally revolt and make vendors take privacy for home and consumer Internet of Things (IoT) devices more seriously in 2021. Expect to see the market start to heavily push back against IoT devices that collect personal data, and pressure government representatives to regulate the capabilities of these devices to protect user privacy.

Corporate Targets and Technologies: Attackers Swarm VPNs and RDPs as the Remote Workforce Swells

Working from home has become a norm for many businesses and has changed the profile of the software and services an average company relies on. While many companies lightly leveraged both Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and Virtual Private Networking (VPN) solutions before, these services have become mainstays in enabling employees to access corporate data and services outside of the traditional network perimeter. In 2021, we expect attackers to significantly ramp up their assaults on RDP, VPN, and other remote access services.

RDP is already one of the most attacked services on the Internet, but we suspect new companies are suddenly using it more as one strategy to give home users access to corporate machines.

While we believe you should only use RDP with VPN, many choose to enable it on its own, offering a target for hackers. Additionally, cyber criminals know remote employees use VPN often. Though VPN offers some security to remote employees, attackers realize that if they can access a VPN, they have a wide-open door to your corporate network. Using stolen credentials, exploits, and good old-fashioned brute-forcing, we believe attacks against RDP, VPN, and remote connection servers will double in 2021.

Attackers Pinpoint Security Gaps in Legacy Endpoints

 Endpoints have become a high priority target for attackers amid the global pandemic. With more employees working at home without some of the network-based protections available through the corporate office, attackers will focus on vulnerabilities in personal computers, their software and operating systems.

It’s ironic that the rise in remote work coincides with the same year Microsoft has ended extended support of some of the most popular versions of Windows – 7 and server 2008. In 2021, we expect cyber criminals to seek out a significant security flaw in Windows 7 in hopes of exploiting legacy endpoints that users can’t easily patch at home.

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While Windows 10 and Server 2019 have been out for quite a while, there’s no getting around the fact that some people rarely update. Windows 7 (and by relation, server 2008) was one of the most popular versions of Windows before 10. Since many considered 8 and others to be problematic, many organizations chose to stick with Windows 7 and server 2008 for as long as they could.

In fact, some organizations may not be able to move away from these old versions easily, since they have specialized legacy equipment that still relies on those older Windows versions. As a result, a significant portion of the industry sticks with old operating systems long past their expiration date. Black hat hackers know this and look for opportunities to take advantage.

You can expect that we’ll see at least one major new Windows 7 vulnerability surface in 2021 as attackers continue to find and target flaws in these legacy endpoints.

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Every Service Without MFA Will Suffer a Breach 

Authentication attacks and the data breaches that fuel them have become a daily occurrence. Cyber criminals have found incredible success using the troves of stolen usernames and passwords available on underground forums to compromise organizations using password spraying and credential stuffing attacks. These attacks take advantage of the fact that many users still fail to choose strong and unique passwords for each of their individual accounts.

Just look at the dark web and the many underground forums. There are now billions of usernames and passwords from various breaches, widely available, with millions added every day.

These databases, paired with the ease of automating authentication attacks, means no Internet-exposed service is safe from cyber intrusion if it isn’t using multi-factor authentication (MFA). We know it’s bold, but we predict that in 2021, every service that doesn’t have MFA enabled will suffer a breach or an account compromise.

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The post Crystal Gaze 2021: Predictions on the Role of Automation and Cloud Computing in Cyberthreat Intelligence appeared first on AiThority.

AI in healthcare is a massive industry. The year 2020 has seen healthcare systems rapidly shift their operating models to deal with the huge influxes of infection cases and deaths caused by the COVID-19. AI has been a big help this year for the leading healthcare and pharma companies and researchers.

In a recent report published by The AI Journal, we revealed how AI is being put to work in the healthcare sector to save time and give core team members on the frontline more solutions to save a loved one, get effective treatment to more people at scale, and understand how a hospital can free up budget, while not losing quality to make the operating model more efficient.

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But we found that there are many more advancements being made today that will inform the future of the healthcare sector. These are my six thoughts on what to look out for in 2021 and beyond for AI in healthcare:

1. AI is not expected to reduce jobs in healthcare

There have been many concerns that AI and machine learning will end up replacing clinicians. But this is not the direction I expect the sector to go in. As Eric Topol laid out in the recommendations of the Topol Review, AI will actually prepare the current workforce for a digital future with new models of care. We may see shifts in roles and some may need to diversify, but AI will actually gift healthcare professionals with more time to reconnect with the human side of medicine and move them away from the complex processes that often act as barriers to delivering the best possible care.

Read More: GravityAI Unveils Enterprise Data Science Marketplace for Fintech and Healthcare

2. AI is not a ‘set it and forget it’ technology

Unfortunately, AI models cannot be built once and remain useful forever. So-called ‘Black Swan’ health events such as we’ve seen with COVID-19 present unique situations and therefore cannot rely on historical data to make accurate predictions. The way to deal with this is to use an AIDevOps model to challenge the AI system by using some data to train the model, and additional datasets to test it. Outlier events like these should then trigger an alert for human review.

3. Leadership must change to fit the needs of AI

A change in leadership style is required. Leaders need to embrace a mindset of innovation that is no longer sustained by acquired experience and past knowledge but is curious, inquisitive, and responsive. Leaders need to be trained in asking the right questions instead of directing in a known and predictable environment. Such a transformation may be difficult in some organizations, and ones that promote experimentation will thrive. However, the difficulty for many is that their governance is not prepared for this kind of agility.

4. Healthcare needs to be bold

There are two main challenges that need to be overcome for us to progress with next-generation technology in healthcare. The first is that healthcare has always taken a ‘prove the cost savings before investing’ approach. This approach to innovation is very much fear-based and doesn’t take into account the unexpected benefits of a new application.

The second challenge is that healthcare has not traditionally been great at incentivizing health providers to share learnings and results for the greater good because they often compete against one another. When it comes to common hurdles like data interoperability, there is a clear benefit in using consolidated buying power and shared data. But to take advantage of this, there needs to be a change in funding structures and more clarity around budgetary responsibility. 

5. VR and AR could come together in mental health treatments

New treatments for mental health conditions are being developed with AI.

Personalized grading of stress responses could be used to measure the impact of and response to exposure therapy, for instance for the treatment of phobias. Indeed, we could soon be in a position to use virtual reality to immerse ourselves in a familiar simulation, measure our reactions and then provide personalized advice as feedback and advancement. This is one way in which the convergence of AI and VR will open the door to a deeper understanding of human emotion and behavior. 

6. But there are some sobering implications for ethics

With all of the opportunities I’ve mentioned, there are also some sobering implications and reflections for medical ethics. To build a brighter healthcare future aided by AI, we must use our moral imagination while rigorously reinforcing and protecting our ethical standards.

Some specific ethical considerations include patient confidentiality, the role that the bot may play in the diagnostic journey, and the risk of potential biases in the data used by machine learning algorithms. It is essential that developers have access to diverse datasets that include a wide range of ethnicities, genders, ages and other key variables. We cannot allow data gaps to put certain patient populations at greater risk of medical errors when using AI.

Conclusion

As we face this fascinating future, a number of questions arise in my mind that we will need to find answers on. What are the pain barriers that healthcare providers will need to go through before they can realize the opportunities? Will COVID-19 ultimately be seen as a catalyst for the improved integration of AI into healthcare systems, or a missed opportunity?

What challenges must be overcome with regards to data privacy, acceptability and ethics? And how can the industry as a whole work to mitigate bias around ethnic and gender diversity in AI-driven solutions?

The post Six Insights Into the Future of AI in Healthcare for 2021 and Beyond appeared first on AiThority.

Amazon HealthLake enables healthcare organizations to store, transform, and analyze all of their data in the cloud

Today at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company announced Amazon HealthLake, a HIPAA-eligible service for healthcare and life sciences organizations. Amazon HealthLake aggregates an organization’s complete data across various silos and disparate formats into a centralized AWS data lake and automatically normalizes this information using machine learning. The service identifies each piece of clinical information, tags, and indexes events in a timeline view with standardized labels so it can be easily searched, and structures all of the data into the Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) industry standard format for a complete view of the health of individual patients and entire populations. As a result, Amazon HealthLake makes it easier for customers to query, perform analytics, and run machine learning to derive meaningful value from the newly normalized data. Organizations such as healthcare systems, pharmaceutical companies, clinical researchers, health insurers, and more can use Amazon HealthLake to help spot trends and anomalies in health data so they can make much more precise predictions about the progression of disease, the efficacy of clinical trials, the accuracy of insurance premiums, and many other applications.

AWS Announces Amazon HealthLake to enable healthcare organizations to store, transform, and analyze all of their data in the cloud

As machine learning becomes more mainstream, companies across every vertical business are trying to apply it to their data to deliver meaningful business value. Healthcare is applying machine learning to improve operations and patient care, with AWS customers like 3M, Anthem, AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb, Cerner, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, GE Healthcare, Infor, Pfizer, and Philips embracing the cloud and machine learning to get more value out of their vast data troves. From family history and clinical observations to diagnoses and medications, healthcare organizations are creating huge volumes of patient information every day with the goal of getting a full view of a patient’s health and applying analytics and machine learning to improve care, analyze population health trends, and improve operational efficiency. However, clinical data is complex and renowned for being siloed, incomplete, incompatible, and stored in on-premises systems spread across multiple locations. Getting all this information aggregated and in the FHIR format is a start toward the goal of standardizing structured data, but the majority of data remains unstructured and still needs to be tagged, indexed, and structured in chronological order to make all of the data understandable and able to query. Some healthcare organizations build rule-based tools to automate the process of transforming unstructured data (e.g., medical histories, physician notes, and medical imaging reports) and tagging clinical information (e.g., diagnoses, medications, and procedures), but these solutions often fail because the data needs to be normalized across disparate systems and because the tools can’t account for every possible variation in spelling, unintended typos, and grammatical errors. Other organizations use general-purpose optical character recognition (OCR) software to process data sources, but these tools lack the medical expertise to be effective and so organizations resort to manual data entry by medical professionals which adds expense to the digitization process. Even if organizations are able to aggregate and structure their data, they still need to build their own analytics and machine learning applications to uncover relationships in the data, discover trends, and make precise predictions. The cost and operational complexity of doing all this work is prohibitive to most organizations; and as a result, the vast majority of organizations end up missing out on the untapped potential to use their data to improve the health of patients and communities.

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Amazon HealthLake offers medical providers, health insurers, and pharmaceutical companies a service that brings together and makes sense of all their patient data, so healthcare organizations can make more precise predictions about the health of patients and populations. The new HIPAA-eligible service enables organizations to store, tag, index, standardize, query, and apply machine learning to analyze data at petabyte scale in the cloud. Amazon HealthLake allows organizations to easily copy health data from on-premises systems to a secure data lake in the cloud and normalize every patient record across disparate formats automatically. Upon ingestion, Amazon HealthLake uses machine learning trained to understand medical terminology to identify and tag each piece of clinical information, index events into a timeline view, and enrich the data with standardized labels (e.g., medications, conditions, diagnoses, procedures, etc.) so all this information can be easily searched. For example, organizations can quickly and accurately find answers to their questions like, “How has the use of cholesterol-lowering medications helped our patients with high blood pressure last year?” To do this, customers can create a list of patients by selecting “High Cholesterol” from a standard list of medical conditions, “Oral Drugs” from a menu of treatments, and blood pressure values from the “Blood Pressure” structured field – and then they can further refine the list by choosing attributes like time frame, gender, and age. Because Amazon HealthLake also automatically structures all of a healthcare organization’s data into the FHIR industry format, the information can be easily and securely shared between health systems and with third-party applications, enabling providers to collaborate more effectively and allowing patients unfettered access to their medical information.

“There has been an explosion of digitized health data in recent years with the advent of electronic medical records, but organizations are telling us that unlocking the value from this information using technology like machine learning is still challenging and riddled with barriers,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President of Amazon Machine Learning for AWS. “With Amazon HealthLake, healthcare organizations can reduce the time it takes to transform health data in the cloud from weeks to minutes so that it can be analyzed securely, even at petabyte scale. This completely reinvents what’s possible with healthcare and brings us that much closer to everyone’s goal of providing patients with more personalized and predictive treatment for individuals and across entire populations.”

By aggregating, labeling, indexing, and structuring all their data, Amazon HealthLake makes it easy for customers to query, analyze, and use machine learning to make sense of their data. Customers can use other AWS analytics and machine learning services with Amazon HealthLake like Amazon QuickSight for interactive dashboards and Amazon SageMaker for easily building, training, and deploying custom machine learning models. For example, healthcare organizations can use Jupyter Notebook templates in Amazon SageMaker to quickly and easily run analysis for common tasks like diagnosis predictions, hospital re-admittance probability, and operating room utilization forecasts. Healthcare and life science organizations can use Amazon HealthLake to get a complete view of patient and population health, derive insights using analytics and machine learning, and discover previously obscured relationships and trends.

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Cerner Corporation, a global healthcare technology company, is focused on using data to help solve issues at the speed of innovation – evolving healthcare to enhance clinical and operational outcomes, help resolve clinician burnout, and improve health equity. “At Cerner we are committed to transforming the future of healthcare through cloud delivery, machine learning, and AI. Working alongside AWS, we are in a position to accelerate innovation in healthcare. That starts with data. We are excited about the launch of Amazon HealthLake and its potential to quickly ingest patient data from various diverse sources and transform the data to perform advanced analytics to unlock new insights and serve many of our initiatives across population health,” said Ryan Hamilton, SVP, Population Health, Cerner.

Ciox Health is a health technology company that is dedicated to improving U.S. health outcomes by transforming clinical data into actionable insights. “At Ciox, we work to enable greater health by improving the way health information is managed,” said Sasidhar Mukkamala, SVP of Data Management, Ciox Health. “Much of the health information that we ingest is unstructured, like notes and handwritten PDFs, and it is a challenge to find solutions that allow us to realize the full analytic value of that data. With 60 percent of the market share in risk adjustments, this is a huge opportunity. We are excited about getting started with Amazon HealthLake and its potential to help us meet this need and deliver better risk adjustments, predictions, billing, and much more, all informed by health data.”

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Konica Minolta Precision Medicine (KMPM) is a life science company dedicated to the advancement of precision medicine to more accurately predict, detect, treat, and ultimately cure disease. “We are building a multi-modal platform at KMPM to handle a significant amount of health data inclusive of pathology, imaging, and genetic information. Amazon HealthLake will allow us to unlock the real power of this multi-modal approach to find novel associations and signals in our data. It will provide our expert team of data scientists and developers the ability to integrate, label, and structure this data faster, and discover insights that our clinicians and pharmaceutical partners require to truly drive precision medicine,” said Kiyotaka Fujii, President of Global Healthcare, Konica Minolta.

Orion Health is a global, award-winning provider of health information technology, advancing population health and precision medicine solutions for the delivery of care across the entire health ecosystem. “At Orion Health, we believe that there is significant untapped potential to transform the healthcare sector by improving how technology is used and providing insights into the data being generated. We are pleased to find a like-minded company in AWS who, with Amazon HealthLake, is now taking the next step in using machine learning to help make sense of health data in a secure, complaint, and auditable way,” said Anne O’Hanlon, Product Director, Orion Health. “Data is frequently messy and incomplete, which is costly and time consuming to clean up. We are excited to work alongside AWS to deliver new ways for patients to interact with the healthcare system, supporting initiatives such as the 21st Century Cures Act designed to make healthcare more accessible and affordable, and Digital Front Door, which aims to improve health outcomes by helping patients receive the perfect care for them from the comfort of their home. Expanding the relationship we enjoy with AWS gives us an opportunity to innovate and explore new ways to deliver patient-centered healthcare and high quality health outcomes that help people live a healthier life.”

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