Ali Parsa, founder of Babylon Health, has created an extraordinary platform — an app-based service that cost-effectively connects top GPs with patients via their smartphones, and is the UK’s leading digital healthcare service.

Babylon allows its users to book a video consultation with a GP in minutes, or message with a photo to receive an answer for simpler questions. The true aim of the service is to leverage realtime data, adaptive health monitoring and clinically curated machine learning to detect diseases more quickly and ultimately prevent them before they happen.

Visiting him at his head office in London, we spoke about the future impact of AI on the provision of healthcare services, how data changes the way we think about wellness and why the digital delivery of medical advice will transform the lives of millions in the developing world.

Ali is a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch. He previously created Circle, a multi-million pound business running private hospitals across Britain. He was named by the Times among the 100 global people to watch in 2012, and by HSJ among the 50 most influential people in UK healthcare.

I met Seth at this secret, underground gathering of thinkers in New York, known as ‘The Influencers’ where he was giving a disturbingly funny talk entitled ‘you can tell a lot about a man by the sex bot he makes for himself.’ Seth Porges is a journalist covering a wide range of topics from pop culture to emerging technologies. He has written for everyone from TechCrunch to Maxim, and is a regular commentator on numerous televisions shows on the National Geographic, Discovery and History channels. I probably should have asked him about the reference in his Wikipedia profile about his work as a test pilot on the maiden voyage of an experimental pulse jet-powered carousel, but we ran out of time talking about why pinball was once a moral hazard in New York City, the challenges of translating social interactions in virtual reality and the future of robotics.

Chetan Dube is the cool math professor you always wished you had at college. Impeccably attired and capable of switching between anecdotes about a childhood spent in New Delhi, Paris and London with deep dive explanations of probabilistic vs deterministic neural networks - he is one of the most interesting personalities in the emerging world of AI and cognitive computing. After founding his company IPsoft, he developed Amelia, a “virtual service-desk employee”, that understands the semantics of language, and can solve business process queries just like a human being. Over coffee in his office in New York, we spoke about the impact of AI on the design of companies, and in particular, the rise of the cognitive enterprise, in which software platforms will be able to understand, learn and anticipate customer needs, even before they know them.

Ankur Kothari is a pioneer in the area of robotic process automation and the design of digital back offices. A co-founder of Automation Anywhere, he has been working over the last decade on transforming entire industries by introducing them to a digital workforce and human–robot partnerships that can help them scale efficiently. We met up in Hyderabad, a city in India where many of the world’s biggest companies locate their outsourced IT and back office operations. We have all heard that robots may be coming for our jobs, but I was curious to learn - will anyone really be sad to see transactional, routine tasks done by a machine rather than a human being?

Geoff Colvin is the author of the bestselling book, ‘Humans Are Underrated’, which outlines the capabilities that will keep human beings from being made utterly obsolete by tomorrow’s robots, algorithms and machine intelligences. A longtime editor and columnist for Fortune, Geoff is also the author of ‘The Upside of the Downturn’, ‘Angel Customers & Demon Customers’, and ‘Talent is Overrated’. We spoke about the rising influence of AI, the skills leaders will need to survive them, and the challenges of integrating across traditional company silos to deliver on the kinds of innovative experiences that customers now demand.