Spotify has announced the acquisition of Niland, a machine learning startup based out of Paris. The music company made the announcement itself this week, explaining that Niland shares its'passion for surfacing the right content to the right user at the right time.' Spotify plans to use the company's technology and know-how to improves its own recommendation abilities, doing so with the power of artificial intelligence behind it. Spotify announced the acquisition on Wednesday, saying that the Niland team will be joining the music company's own team in its New York office. The terms of the deal weren't revealed, such as how much Spotify paid for the company or when the deal was finalized. We do know, however, that personalized recommendations on Spotify are about to get much better than to the startup's work in machine learning and artificial intelligence.

While Spotify may still be having a difficult time achieving profitability, the company has the money to continue buying essentially whatever it wants, as the financing and fundraising never seems to stop. In 2016 alone, the powerhouse collected $1 billion in debt financing and another half a billion in a convertible note, and that is to say nothing of the untold millions that weren't revealed in fundraising rounds and the actual revenue brought in by the company on its own.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff isn't just predicting that artificial intelligence will one day help run everyone's companies, he's already using it at Salesforce today. He's got a special, not-yet-released version of Einstein, the company's artificial intelligence tech baked into its products, helping him run his company, he told Wall Street analysts on Thursday during the company's quarterly conference call. He invites this version of Einstein, called Einstein Guidance, to his Monday morning staff meeting, where up to 30 top executives update him on their progress for the quarter. Einstein Guidance is designed to do forecasting and modeling. It's especially useful to make sure that managers aren't trying to snow him.

A few weeks ago the new U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin took some public flak for suggesting, in response to an interviewer's question, that he was "not worried at all" that artificial intelligence would threaten the jobs of human workers, because in his view it is "50 or 100 years away." It's not clear why Mnuchin would say that, but with respect, I have to correct him. The original question to Mnuchin was rooted in popular worries that AI will eliminate jobs in the near future. However there's growing evidence that as companies embrace AI to stay competitive, which they will, in the end these changes will create more jobs than they destroy. Earlier this year, ServiceNow commissioned a survey of senior executives at 1,874 companies of varying sizes across numerous industries in seven global markets.

Music streaming service Spotify on Wednesday disclosed it has acquired the team and technology behind Niland, a French start-up with a service for delivering music recommendations. The move signals that Spotify wants to incorporate more artificial intelligence (AI) into its system as it fights off competition from alternatives like Apple Music. Niland is not well-known in the field of AI. But for years its CEO, Damien Tardieu, has done research on ways to extract meaningful information from raw music content in order to form connections with other music. This approach differs from collaborative filtering, one of the techniques that Spotify and others use.

Google I/O, the company's annual developer conference, is the company's biggest event of the year. One of the main talking points at this year's conference will likely be artificial intelligence. Google has been slowly injecting AI into many of its products and services and the company's CEO Sundar Pichai has sounded very bullish on the prospects of artificial intelligence in recent public appearances. As our chart illustrates, Google's recent M&A activity also speaks its ambitions in the AI field. According to numbers compiled by CB Insights, the company acquired 11 artificial intelligence startups since 2012, more than any other company.

Welcome to the Remark Holdings First Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Becky Herrick of LHA. Thank you all for joining us today for the Remark Holdings first quarter 2017 financial results conference call. On the call today are Chairman and CEO, Shing Tao; and CFO, Doug Osrow. After the prepared remarks, we'll open the call for questions. A webcast replay of today's call will be available at www.remarkholdings.com. Some of the statements made today may be forward-looking statements. These statements involve risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. Any forward-looking statements reflect Remark Holdings current views and Remark Holdings expressly disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements after the date hereof. This disclaimer is only a summary of Remark Holdings' statutory forward-looking statements disclaimer which is included in its filings with the SEC.

Welcome to the Hackett Group First Quarter Earnings Conference Call. Your lines have been placed on listed only mode. Hosting tonight's call are Mr. Ted Fernandez, Chairman and CEO; and Mr. Rob Ramirez, Chief Financial Officer. Mr. Ramirez, you may begin. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us to discuss The Hackett Group's First Quarter Results. Speaking on the call today and here to answer your questions are Ted Fernandez, Chairman and CEO of The Hackett Group; and myself, Rob Ramirez, Chief Financial Officer. Our press announcement was released over the wires at 4:14 p.m. Eastern Time. For a copy of the release, please visit our website at www.thehackettgroup.com. We will also place any additional financial or statistical data discussed on this call that is not contained in the release on the Investor Relations page of our website. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that in the following comments and in the Q&A session, we will be making statements about expected future results, which may be forward-looking statements for the purposes of the federal securities laws. These statements relate to our current expectations, estimates and projections and are not a guarantee of future performance.

NVIDIA has reported Q1 revenue of $1.94 billion, buoyed by record datacenter sales of $409 million. The datacenter business has been growing by leaps and bounds for the graphics chipmaker, thanks largely to the rapidly expanding market for high GPUs in deep learning. Revenue for the first quarter (Q1 FY18) beat analyst estimates and represents a 48 percent increase from last year at this time. Even more encouraging was net income, which amounted to $507 million for the quarter. That's more than twice that reported for the first quarter in 2016.

NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA) stock surged on Wednesday in the wake of the company's earnings report on Tuesday evening, but it climbed even more on Thursday after the analyst day. It's really no surprise to anyone that artificial intelligence and deep learning were two key highlights of the chip maker's analyst day. Macquarie Research analyst Srini Pajjuri said in a note to investors that NVIDIA Corporation (NVDA) management estimates the total addressable market at $11 billion for "training" and $15 billion for "inference." The company's new Volta datacenter product focuses on "inferencing," the segment of the market that the analyst expects to be the more competitive of the two. It also announced a new self-driving partnership with Toyota, which builds on its other self-driving agreements with Tesla, Volvo and Audi.