Fast response, operational efficiency, and better engagement – these are the promises of using a chatbot. Having a program to answer most of the inquiries can help to reduce staff issues, who can then focus on more value-adding or complex tasks. Chatbots readily collect data, allowing marketing teams to understand if a situation is developing or a trend is emerging. For a global e-commerce firm, it allows them to respond to customer queries all day long. Lastly, they learn quickly and etching their wisdom in your corporate memory forever.

In June 2015, the World Economic Forum published The Future of Financial Services - How disruptive innovations are reshaping the way financial services are structured, provisioned and consumed. The paper defined a taxonomy for disruption in financial services. It identified six broad areas and within them, 11 clusters of disruptive innovation. The six areas are Payments, Market Provisioning, Investment Management, Insurance, Deposits & Lending and Capital Raising. Of the 11 clusters in the report, the combination of Alternative Lending and Shifting Customer Preference clusters are most relevant to today's article.

Jürgen, it's a privilege to have you here as one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence and, more specifically, deep learning--its hottest field right now. Before you go into all of those fields, we would like to understand the person Jurgen Schmidhuber better. Perhaps you can tell us a few things that you're particularly proud of in your career. One of the things I'm proud of: I think I understand what it means to be curious and how to implement curiosity, which I think is essential to build agents that learn from experience through their own self-generated experiments. Agents who are motivated to invent, in a directed way, action sequences or experiments that lead to data that tell them something about how the world works that they didn't know yet.

Instagram believes artificial intelligence could help fight trolls and junk messages. The photo-sharing service debuted Thursday two new tools it said would help it reduce the amount of spam it receives as well block offensive comments that appear on posts and live video. People can choose to have the automatic comment filter on or off. If an out-of-line comment still appears on a certain post with the filter on, people can still report it to Instagram as they would typically do. Instagram said that the comment filter is only available in English, but will debut in other languages at later dates.

"Lordy, I hope there are tapes," said an exasperated James Comey in his testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8. Comey's desire reflects a familiar one for individuals accused of lying when the stakes are high. The former FBI director wished for tapes because, in our society, audio and video recordings serve as a final arbiter of truth. He said, she said always loses to what the tape shows. Greg Allen (@Gregory_C_Allen) is an adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

The financial industry has been all over artificial intelligence (AI) supporting front-end trading processes, leaving much of the rest of the business in the last century. That won't be true for much longer if Bikram Singh, founder and CEO of EZOPS, has his way. I caught up with Singh during the recent kick-off of the SAP Next-Gen Innovation Community for Financial Services at the SAP Leonardo Center in New York City. "A lot of functions in the middle and back office typically have been neglected in the AI revolution, and we see a tremendous opportunity here to radically transform the landscape," said Singh. "We are specializing in applying AI and machine learning to address use cases in the back office, including data reconciliation."

There's a good chance the next big step forward in artificial intelligence innovation is going to come out of Israel. And when it does, the Tel Aviv-based AI startup Cortica may well be the source of that breakthrough. Indeed, the company is already well on its way. The company plans to ramp up its hiring, co-founder and CEO Igal Raichelgauz tells BGR, in addition to building an AI product solution that can be extended to several industry verticals. The company's ambitions belie its size.

Facebook is due to start hiding posts from people who spam users' news feed with clickbait, sensationalised and misinformative articles. In a statement, the social media giant said it was making the update "to reduce low quality links" in users' news feed. Facebook said it carried out research which showed that a small group of users were "routinely sharing vast amounts of public posts per day", which was effectively spamming people's feeds. The study showed that the same people, who were sharing vast amounts of public posts, were also sharing low quality content. As a result of the research, Facebook said it would "deprioritise" posts being shared from those accounts.

Drones are slowly but steadily becoming mainstream with its increasing use by the military and enthusiasts alike. However, the commercial usage of drones for business-to-customer operations is what will actually make them common. One such usage of drones is for making deliveries. Unmanned aerial vehicles might be a great alternative to the current system of making deliveries. Big tech companies such as Google, retail giants such as Amazon and even specialized delivery services such as UPS are betting on drone deliveries as the alternative to the current system of human-based deliveries, which comes at high-costs, doesn't have a high rate of making timely deliveries and even increases base costs due to pilferage.

Google once had a reputation for bankrolling moonshots. It spent billions creating a self-driving car, started Google Fiber to bring ultra-high-speed internet to the masses, and acquired the Darpa-backed robotics company Boston Dynamics. But since restructuring itself as a holding company called Alphabet in 2015 and moving many of its bigger ideas outside the core Google business structure, Mountain View's ambitions have become a little more sober and its investment strategy more restrained. As Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat put it during an earnings call last year: "We continue to rationalize our portfolio of products to ensure we efficiently and effectively focus our resources behind our biggest bets across Alphabet." In practical terms, that's meant scaling back Google Fiber and selling off some of its wilder projects, and it's also opened the door for another company–the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank–to take the lead on some of today's most audacious bets in global tech.