Xiaolang Zhang was in custody for stealing trade secrets from the Apple project, according to a copy of the criminal complaint posted online.

The charge is punishable by 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

“Apple takes confidentiality and the protection of our intellectual property very seriously,” the California-based internet titan said in response to an AFP query.

“We’re working with authorities on this matter and will do everything possible to make sure this individual and any other individuals involved are held accountable for their actions.”

Zhang was hired by Apple in December of 2015 to be part of a team developing hardware and software for self-driving vehicles, a project that was a “closely-guarded secret,” according to the complaint filed by the FBI.

Zhang took paternity leave in the month of April, going with his family to China.

Upon his return to Apple at the end of April, he told a supervisor he was quitting to return to China to be near his ailing mother.

Zhang mentioned he planned to go work for a Chinese self-driving vehicle startup called Xiaopeng Motors, or XMotors, in Guangzhou, according to the complaint.

The supervisor thought Zhang “evasive” and brought in an Apple product security team, which had Zhang turn in all company devices and walked him off campus, according to the filing.

Apple security found that Zhang’s activity on the company network surged “exponentially” in the days before he returned from paternity leave.

Zhang did searches of confidential databases, and downloaded technical files, the criminal complaint said.

Documents downloaded by Zhang included some on topics such as “prototypes,” according to the case against him.

Apple also had closed-circuit camera recording of Zhang going into autonomous driving tech team labs late on a Saturday night while he was on paternity leave, according to the filing.

Zhang later admitted to taking circuit boards and a Linux server from the hardware lab, and to transferring some Apple files to his wife’s computer, the FBI said in the complaint.

Zhang was “voluntarily terminated” from Apple in early March, and FBI agents searched his home in June as part of their investigation.

Zhang told the FBI at that time he was working at XMotors offices in Silicon Valley, according to the complaint.

Zhang was heading to China with a “last-minute round-trip ticket” when FBI agents arrested him at an airport in the Silicon Valley city of San Jose, the filing said.

To keep up the pace, the most forward looking will need to capitalise on the next generation of cloud computing – autonomous services.

What are autonomous services?

Today, autonomous represents a new category of cloud services; empowering businesses to lower costs, reduce risk, go beyond predictive insights to suggested action and steer innovation into the fast lane. Offering unprecedented levels of simplicity, self-service and security, through being using self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing, autonomous cloud services are setting a new industry standard for IT.

The resulting ‘autonomous enterprise’ won’t need people to run, maintain, integrate, develop and secure its core IT systems. Instead, AI and automation will work together to manage everything from database to application development and provide actionable insight around business processes, all without human input. It will also support businesses in becoming more ‘digitally resilient’ against technology risks beyond cyber security.

Closing the skills gap

It’s a move I know is already being welcomed. The 2018 Gartner CIO Agenda Survey found that more than one in three CIOs in the region have deployed or are in short-term planning to deploy AI technologies; indicating a strong interest in technologies that enable superior data capabilities with less manual intervention.

Indeed, with Willis Towers Watson finding that 63% of APAC employers struggle to attract skilled employees, it’s no surprise CIOs want solutions which free up talent to perform higher value work. Labor now accounts for approximately 75% of the total cost of database management, according to IDC, so redeploying staff will mean huge time and money savings.

Work smarter

CIOs don’t just want to save costs – they want to move faster and smarter to take the business in more exciting directions than ever before. Autonomous will be key to fulfilling those aims.

FORTH SMART in Thailand, for example, participated in the early adopter stage and has seen results up to 80 times faster.

Similarly, Accenture needed a better way to manage its largescale professional services workforce. Trialing an autonomous cloud solution against its key, data-intensive HR application, the company can get quicker and more personalized analytics to make smarter, faster workforce decisions.

Build digital resilience

Autonomous services will also remove human error from tasks; critical in a number of areas.

Take security. By 2022, Gartner predicts that a company’s cybersecurity rating will become as important as its credit rating to customers, suppliers and partners. Yet, security attacks and breaches are increasing, and humans can’t keep up. In fact, Gartner previously predicted that 95% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault.

With AI and automation, businesses can automate the detection, prevention and response to security breaches, performance anomalies, and vulnerabilities. Only by using machines to fight machines can companies reprioritize and rethink about how they defend their information.

A boon to small business

Autonomous IT will be a boon to businesses both small and large, because in today’s agile digital age, being big isn’t enough – nor is being fast. Instead, organisations must be smart, so they can move quickly in the right direction. That’s precisely what autonomous cloud enables companies to do.

With autonomous, businesses without their own database administrators or hardware will suddenly gain access to things like data warehousing solutions for the very first time.

Small US provider QMP Health, for example, can now discover inefficiencies in lab work and prepare test results in as little as one hour, instead of two weeks. Patients receive quicker care, and the business is more competitive against larger rivals.

Autonomous services are precisely the kind of technology that Gartner has predicted forward-looking CIOs in APAC will strive to adopt.

This is why we expect that, within the next two years, 50 percent-plus of all enterprise data will be managed autonomously, and that IT operations currently experiencing 20,000 human-managed interventions per year will soon fall to just 20 as a higher degree of intelligent automation permeates cloud platforms.

The power of autonomous services, capable of self-patching, self-tuning and automatically optimizing performance while running, is just the start. It won’t be long before autonomous cloud services bring simplicity, self-service and security into all areas of the business, providing new fuel for innovation. Some organisations are ready. What about you?

“You will be surprised to hear that there is the highest penetration rate of mobile payment in rural areas like Tibet and Mongolia even though they are not as developed as big cities like Hangzhou or Shanghai,” Zhu said.

Ant Financial’s mission is to serve users in rural areas and make financial services more inclusive, especially for people living in the countryside, he said.

“Mobile payment is bridging the gap for rural China. You will find that villages in China are different from 30 years ago,” Zhu said.

The mobile payments market in China has grown to a whopping $16 trillion annually, according to the Financial Times. The market is dominated by Alipay and Tencent’s WeChat Pay.

Zhu said there are three reasons why mobile payment is popular in China.

First, transaction fees are even lower than credit card fees. Second, the market size is huge – China has about 1.3 billion people. And third, Alipay and Ant Financial are ecosystems of Alibaba Group, a Chinese multinational e-commerce, retail, Internet, AI and technology conglomerate that does not pursue profit as its only objective.

“We believe that if we provide better products and a better life, people will use ours [products] and then we can make profit,” Zhu said.

With a mission to “bring the world equal opportunities”, Ant Financial is dedicated to creating an open, shared credit system and financial services platform through technology innovations, and to provide consumers and small businesses with safe and convenient inclusive financial services globally, he said.