As cloud computing continues to disrupt traditional business models and big data continues to grow exponentially, techies and investors alike are looking for the top trends that will change how we do business in 2016 and beyond. Hybrid and public cloud services continue to rise in popularity, with investors claiming their stakes. Venture capital firms are investing most heavily in SaaS companies, proving that cloud solutions will be even more lucrative in the future. Get your company on stage at TNW Europe. While some have doubted Dropbox's ability to go public based on its 10 billion valuation, the fact that this leading SaaS company has raised 1.1 billion in six rounds of funding is pretty impressive.

For Microsoft, the future of communication is bots. The company believes that artificial intelligence will eventually change the way we connect with people, businesses, and our computers. At Microsoft's Build developer conference on Wednesday, the company highlighted a handful of ways its integrating bots into platforms like Skype, and touched on new developments to Microsoft's personal bot assistant, Cortana. Microsoft also debuted a bot framework that lets developers integrate bots into their applications--similar to the way mobile developers can make apps for iOS or Android, they can now build bots on top of Microsoft's framework. Bots to order pizza, help with your kids' homework, schedule hotel reservations, these seemingly simple tasks will fall to an army of bots in our phones and computers and chat systems, personal assistants powered by AI, combing through data and applying logic and executing tasks based on our needs.

Artificial intelligence may seem like a futuristic concept, but we're already experiencing it in real ways in our lives, whether we know it or not -- in areas including speech recognition, spam filters and even loan processing. And AI is only going to get more sophisticated from here. That was one of the messages from Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2), founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Etzioni spoke with us for this week's episode of the GeekWire radio show and podcast. Our conversation comes amid a boom in everyday AI, from self-driving cars to a computer that has mastered the game of Go. Microsoft put its stake in the ground with an AI-driven vision that CEO Satya Nadella calls "Conversation as a Platform," with virtual agents working on our behalf. Etzioni takes a much more optimistic view of AI than some of his peers. "The existential risk is just way overblown," he says. "It's much more likely that an asteroid will strike the Earth and annihilate life as we know it than AI will turn evil. Listen to the show below, download the MP3 here, and continue reading for an edited transcript of this week's show. Todd Bishop: Oren, in your current position, you really have a sense for the state of artificial intelligence. I think a lot of people out there see it in their daily lives in a very primitive form. They're watching Google's DeepMind beat a world champion Go player. The potential of artificial intelligence is there in a rudimentary form. Where are we now today in terms of the state of artificial intelligence, and where do you think we'll go over the next three to five years? Oren Etzioni: I do actually think that people are using it more than they realize. In addition to something like Siri, Google Search algorithm uses AI and machine learning all the time. Speech dictation on our phones whether it's Android or iPhone has gotten tremendously better and that's using deep learning behind the scenes to improve what's called a speech recognition. Loan processing these days is often done in a highly automated fashion using machine learning. As a matter of fact, AI is becoming more invisible and integrated into our lives. Of course, that can be a little bit scary to people. They say, "Wait a minute.

X2AIX2AI founders Eugene Bann (left) and Michiel Rauws (right) intrigue school children with Karim's automatic responses at Jusoor school, located within a Syrian refugee community in Al Marj, Lebanon. According to the UN, over 3 million Syrian refugees are now in neighboring Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, with millions more displaced within Syria. To help with this crisis, artificial intelligence startup X2AI is in the middle of a two week stay in Beirut, Lebanon, where it's piloting the use of artificial intelligence as a psychotherapy treatment for refugees. Partnering with Singularity University and the Field Innovation Team, X2AI is pitching the psychotherapy bot (named Karim) to aid workers and refugee communities. X2AIX2AI founder and CTO Eugene Bann watches on as a student from Jusoor school has a conversation with Karim in Arabic, and his first interaction with an AI.

Go looks simple, deceptively so. The Chinese board game is played on a board with a grid of 19x19 lines. The object is for two players to alternately place black and white markers on vacant intersections of those lines. And now, this nearly 3,000-year-old board game is a frontier of Artificial Intelligence development. At the time of writing, Google's DeepMind AI's AlphaGo program has played four games of a five game series against Go world champion, South Korea's Lee se-Dol.

SAN FRANCISCO – The next step in regulating, and potentially expanding, drone use in the U.S. hit a deadline Friday, when the Federal Aviation Administration was slated to receive recommendations on very small drones. As consumers and the industry surge forward with ideas for what they want to do with drones, the FAA is still working on the details on how these new devices, dubbed UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles) or UAS (unmanned aerial systems), will be treated. The report due to the FAA comes from the Micro UAS Aviation Rulemaking Committee, or the ARC. Its charter was to come up with recommendations for the FAA covering "micro UAS," or drones weighing less than 4.4 pounds. That size of drone includes everything from small, inexpensive toy drones to 3,000, film set quality flying cameras.

President Barack Obama is acknowledging that "civilians have been killed that shouldn't have been" in past U.S. drone strikes, but says the administration is now "very cautious" about taking strikes where women or children are present. Asked at a news conference about an increase in the number of people targeted in several drone strikes against extremist targets in Libya, Syria and Somalia, Obama said the "legal architecture" around the use of drone strikes in the past hasn't been precise. But in the last several years, he says, the administration has worked hard to prevent civilian deaths. He says the U.S. has to take responsibility when it is not acting appropriately. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

There is huge potential for deep machine learning to become a valuable asset in the intelligence gathering space, according to Pentagon Deputy Secretary Robert Work -- it could ultimately allow U.S. forces to get an edge in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS, ISIL, IS) by providing greater insights into their networks and practices. Work made the statement during a roughly hour-long talk called Securing Tomorrow, held March 30 by the Washington Post, where he addressed some of the threat concerns facing the United States and the strategy the Department of Defense is deploying to overcome them. Moderated by Post columnist David Ignatius, the discussion also focused on how the behemoth agency is approaching new technologies and the perceived threats being seen from top international competitors, like Russia and China. "Without question, we are absolutely certain, that the use of deep learning machines is going to allow us to have a better understanding of ISIS as a network and a better understanding of how we can target it precisely and lead to its defeat." The evaluative capabilities and intelligence gathering promise of deep machine learning, Work said, has already shown great potential through the use of publicly available materials on social media, which paint a clearer picture of the events surrounding the downing of Malaysian passenger airliner MH17.

I recently had the opportunity to learn more about Inbenta, a provider of Natural Language Search technology for intelligent assistant and web self-service technologies. I spoke with global marketing director Julie Casson and Kelly Foster, linguist, to gain insight into a company I didn't know much about. Inbenta originated in Barcelona, and now has offices in the United States, France, Singapore, Brazil and the Netherlands. Casson and Foster are located at the office in Sunnyvale, California. Prior to our conversation, I knew that Inbenta offers intelligent assistant technology and an extremely innovative 3D avatar, called Victoria.

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your gullible Automaton bloggers. We'll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here's what we have so far (send us your events!): Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today's videos. "Our new technology solves all your problems linked to writing and typing. The automated cell uses an advanced technology that recognizes the human voice and types the exact same text on the device of your choice. The technology is available for pen, pencil, keyboard, laptop, smartphone and tablet."