Microsoft Corp. has agreed to acquire Wand Labs, a startup whose messaging technology will help upgrade the software giant's efforts in chatbots. Financial terms of the deal weren't disclosed. Earlier this week, Microsoft MSFT, 1.41% agreed to a blockbuster acquisition of LinkedIn Corp. LNKD, 0.02% for 26.2 billion. Redwood City, Calif.-based Wand Labs will join the Bing engineering and platform group at Microsoft. The Bing group has been developing technology that fits into Microsoft's strategy surrounding what Chief Executive Satya Nadella calls "conversation as a platform."

If you write marketing or advertising text for a living, you may want to get a second job skill. That's because software that writes text is here, and it is tackling a growing list of assignments. Several companies offer software that regularly churns out thousands of stories and reports based on structured data, like financial results. Ads that literally write themselves emerged last week, as IBM announced a new service based on its Watson supercomputer. A program called Quakebot has generated earthquake stories for the LA Times.

Consider: Facebook snapped up shopping search engine TheFind this spring and virtual reality startups Pebbles Interfaces and Surreal Vision last year, building on the social networking leader's 2014 purchase of Oculus VR. E-commerce giant Amazon nabbed cloud computing startups Amiato, 2lemetry, Elemental Technologies and Italy's Nice, as well as chipmaker Annapurna Labs, which brought it new data center technology. Google and its parent Alphabet acquired at least 15 small companies last year, many with mobile technologies. By the 1980s, many were dismantled. Some tech pundits fret that Google, Amazon and Facebook could stray too far from their core businesses as well.

Bengaluru: Wipro Ltd will use its artificial intelligence platform Holmes to automate several aspects of its so-called fixed-price projects, saving up to 46.5 million and freeing around 3,000 engineers from mundane software maintenance activities. The move is part of Wipro's larger plan to generate 60- 70 million in revenue by selling the platform to new and existing clients in the current financial year. About 30,000 of Wipro's workforce in the delivery side of the business are engaged in fixed-price projects. The company has over 150,000 employees, including 110,000 in delivery. New chief executive officer Abidali Neemuchwala has set an ambitious target for Wipro-- more than tripling its revenue growth to 12-14% for fiscal 2017.

IBM Watson has talked tennis with Serena Williams and music with Bob Dylan. Now it wants to talk to you -- via online ads. The Weather Company, acquired by IBM in January, will begin bringing Watson-enhanced interactive advertisements to The Weather Channel and Weather Underground apps on Android and iOS and to weather.com and wunderground.com The ads, powered by Watson's artificial intelligence, will prompt consumers to ask questions such as "What would be good to cook for dinner?" or "Is this medicine safe for my child?" The first companies with Watson-enabled ads will be Campbell Soup, GSK Consumer Healthcare and Unilever.

According to MarketandMarkets, the artificial intelligence (AI) market is estimated to grow from 419.7 million in 2014 to 5.05 billion by 2020, growing at a CAGR of 53.65% from 2015 to 2020. The Media and Advertising sector is expected to drive the growth of AI during this period. IBM, Microsoft, and Google are key players in the market, and now Salesforce is trying to make inroads into it. For the first quarter of fiscal 2017, Salesforce's revenue grew 27% over the year to 1.92 billion, above analyst estimate of 1.89 billion. Net income was 38.8 billion or 0.06 per share. Non GAAP EPS was 0.24, beating analyst forecast of 0.25.

Over the last year, we have heard leading minds warning of the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI). We've since seen a robot that can take a beating and get back up unfazed, and borne witness to a computer that can best a Go master at his extremely complex game. Find and replace "Google" with a nefarious "Skynet" clone and you have yourself the start of a film franchise. Before it inevitably takes over the world, what impact will AI and robotics actually have in day-to-day business -- and who might benefit? When Arnold Schwarzenegger's T-800 character drove his Chevrolet Nova through the police station window in response to the "unhelpful" duty officer, I suspect not many people thought he was after his job.

In March, the Toyota Research Institute bought up Cambridge-based startup Jaybridge Robotics, and according to Tech Insider, they may be expanding with another famous Massachusetts company: Google's Boston Dynamics, the maker of the Big Dog and Atlas robots. Google has been talking about selling the Waltham-based Boston Dynamics, for a couple of months now, with companies such as Toyota Research Institute and Amazon.com Around that time, TRI, which seeks to create a car that is incapable of crashing, announced a deal to acquire Jaybridge, a 16-member software engineering company, in order to add more expertise to creating "autonomous vehicle products." Tech Insider noted that the deal hasn't been finalized, but that "the ink is nearly dry." On the other side of the alleged deal is Google, which acquired the Waltham-based company in 2013.

According to MarketandMarkets, the artificial intelligence (AI) market is estimated to grow from 419.7 million in 2014 to 5.05 billion by 2020, growing at a CAGR of 53.65% from 2015 to 2020. The Media and Advertising sector is expected to drive the growth of AI during this period. IBM, Microsoft, and Google are key players in the market, and now Salesforce is trying to make inroads into it. For the first quarter of fiscal 2017, Salesforce's revenue grew 27% over the year to 1.92 billion, above analyst estimate of 1.89 billion. Net income was 38.8 billion or 0.06 per share. Non GAAP EPS was 0.24, beating analyst forecast of 0.25.

It was reported that Hewlett-Packard Co. said it will cut 25,000 to 30,000 more jobs as part of a 2.7 billion restructuring September 15, 2015. PC company HP Inc. will report earnings after the bell Wednesday. Meanwhile, Microsoft wrapped a major deal involving the hit game Minecraft. The personal computer company will report second quarter results when the markets close Wednesday. Analysts polled by S&P Global Market Intelligence project earnings of 38 cents a share on 11.7 billion in revenue.