From the early thinking captured in Alan Turing’s 1950 paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ to IBM’s Deep Blue defeating world chess champion Gary Kasparov in 1997 and Google’s Alpha Go besting Chinese Go champion Kie Je in 2017, there have been exponential shifts in both the adoption and benefits of AI.

Why Does ‘digital disruption' get all the press? And “does the low ranking of the physical technologies mean they don’t count?” Is that why the leaders we surveyed were moderately to strongly engaged with digital technologies, but relatively ignorant when it came to emerging disruptors like autonomous vehicles and artificial intelligence?

Tax relief is welcomed by business, but when in history has reducing costs generated sustainable growth? Making it cheaper to do business through tax cuts, incentives and easing regulation does provide a much needed measure of support. But no business has ever produced a sustainable profit through reducing costs, and no economy has transitioned by government stimulus alone.

In the next 5 years, global Machine-to-Machine connections will grow by 400% from 5 billion to over 20 billion. In the past six years Uber has grown from a mere app to a 50 billion-dollar business. The driverless electric car is a reality, and the noxious methane gas that once escaped the Artic Ocean in meter-wide plumes now bubbles out of the water in kilometre-wide columns.