Abstract
Artificial Intelligence is the “Next Big Thing.” Artificial Intelligence (AI) is the most profound innovation by humans, with a far deeper and wider impact on our lives, than all preceding innovations from steam engine of 1712 to the Internet. AI has the potential to transform the very role of humans in our society. Its disruptive power is evidenced in a growing number of cases even today – Apple’s Siri, Amazon Echo, Google Assistant, IBM Watson and Tesla cars. What is AI? What can it do (and not do)? How does it work? Where can it be applied? This presentation is designed to demystify AI and help your company to harness its unique power to smarten and uplift your business. Using successful business cases the presentation highlights how and where AI is being used. It provides a roadmap for companies starting AI projects with approaches for discovering innovation opportunities that add business and customer value with AI. Finally, it offers a structured approach with “AI&U Canvas” for developing a successful business model with innovative AI ideas. The use of AI for future competitiveness is a must. As a result, it is extremely important for everyone, especially for business decision makers, to understand the power, significance, and relevance that AI will have not only on our lives but also on business and society as a whole. AI is inevitable. 

Speaker Profile


Sharad is best characterized as a “big picture” man, possessing a valuable ability to absorb complex concepts and express them in an easy to understand form. This skill serves him very well as a consultant for business and marketing strategy. He is an electronics engineer and physicist by education and a marketing strategist by profession. He is often called a technology philosopher and strategist for creating business value with digital technologies.


Sharad is a global citizen, having lived in Europe, USA, and India and worked for the best of global companies — Intel, IBM, Siemens, and Tata. At Intel, he held senior management positions involving areas of technology applications, business development, marketing and strategy for several vertical industry segments including healthcare, communications, and digital entertainment. While working at Siemens and IBM, he held several patents in microprocessor technology. He is based in Munich.


His passion for technology and its impact on our lives has motivated him to write books to demystify new digital technologies and illustrate their business impact. “AI&U: Transforming Artificial Intelligence into Business” is the latest, published in 2017. “Social Resource: Transforming Social Media into Business” was published in 2011.


In spite of being passionate about technology, Sharad is aware and concerned about problems that technology creates. However, he believes that eventually technologies like the Internet, AI, robotics, biotech, genetics, new materials, and space will help create innovations and solutions for many of our current global problems in environment, energy, inequality, poverty, health, and demography.