Processing payments for thousands of contractors is an onerous task large enterprises grapple with as they hire outsiders for technical and business services. IBM licked this challenge using blockchain software to curb the costs and time it takes to process invoices generated by contingent labor workers. IBM's Contingent Labor on IBM Blockchain automatically tracks time sheets, purchase orders and other information and secures the appropriate approvals by the approved parties, says Burton...

Epiphanies at innovation conventions are hardly new, but Tim Heinze wasn’t expecting his when the light bulb went off. The director of strategic operations for insurance company AXA XL’s North American property unit, Heinze had just watched a presentation in which an IBM engineer talked about how Watson, the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) software, generates efficiencies in offshore oil drilling operations. The presenter claimed that the Watson technology could “help one engineer...

Agriculture companies are always striving to produce better tasting, longer lasting fruits and vegetables. Whether it’s corn or berries, produce diminishes in value the minute it goes from the stalk or vine to the market. Driscoll’s, a $3.5 billion provider of berry plants, is turning to emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), the internet of things (IoT) and blockchain, to produce hardier plants and fortify its supply chain. “We’re just scratching...

For all the hype, blockchain has yet to go mainstream in the enterprise. That may well change in 2018 as the technology's reputation for trusted transactions continues to grow among IT leaders. Blockchain is a shared digital ledger for recording transactions. Each transaction among participants in a network is tucked into a record known as a block that is digitally signed to ensure its authenticity and create consensus about the state of transactions at any given second. What has CIOs excited...