While some people might think Cinco de Mayo is about Mexican independence, it's actually a holiday that celebrates the day three Americans fought and defeated El Guapo at the Battle of Santa Poco. And it's just one of the many things Mexico is famous for. Her rich cultural heritage has resulted in some of the world's best cuisine that has been exported to every corner of the planet. Then there are the other exports, like those depicted in the recent third season of Narcos, a gripping thriller about the country's cartels in the 1980s. Mexico also plays a key role in regional international trade as the US' neighbor and second largest export market.

Google shares slumped on Monday after the company failed to beat analyst predictions, following a year of internal turmoil, privacy concerns, and several international fines. Stock for Alphabet, Google's parent company, was down 7% in after-hours trading after the company reported first quarter revenue of $36.34bn, lower than the $37.33bn revenue forecast by analysts. The quarter one earnings represent a 17% increase from the same time last year, in which it reported $31.15bn in revenue. In a call with investors on Monday, Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, said the company would continue to invest more in algorithms on YouTube, following recent incidents that saw the platform offering misinformation, hate speech, and disturbing content targeting children. He also promised to continue to address user privacy concerns.

AI in commerce is a fast-growing -- and highly lucrative -- industry. A recent report published by Juniper Research predicts that global retail spending on AI and machine learning will reach $7.3 billion per year by 2022, up from an estimated $2 billion in 2018. Stores with and without brick-and-mortar presences cite cost savings, increased productivity, and more informed business decision-making as the leading adoption drivers; that's part of the reason why retail AI deployments experienced a sevenfold increase from 2016, according to Capgemini. Vue.ai is looking to cash in on the trend, and it's raising venture capital to lay the stage for its next round of growth. The Fremont, California-based subbrand of AI startup Mad Street Den today announced that it's raised $17 million in a series B financing round led by Falcon Edge Capital, with participation from Sequoia Capital India and KDDI Innovation Fund's Global Brain.

Tesla's "autonomy day" kicked off on Monday morning at the electric-vehicle maker's headquarters in Palo Alto, California, where executives including CEO Elon Musk were expected to give investors more details about the company's self-driving technology, known as Autopilot. "Tesla is making significant progress in the development of its autonomous driving software and hardware, including our FSD computer, which is currently in production and which will enable full-self driving via future over-the-air software updates," the company said when it announced the event. Attendees were given red, Tesla-branded badges with sequential numbers, assumably for test rides of the full self-driving functionality. Musk took the stage just before noon alongside Pete Bannon, the vice president of Autopilot engineering, as more than 40,000 people watched remotely via the company's live YouTube stream. Bannon explained how Tesla designed a new chip for its Autopilot software, noting that the company was able to leverage expertise from multiple teams across the business.

Tesla, under pressure to show it can generate profits on its main business of making electric cars, on Monday trumpeted a custom-designed computer chip to let its vehicles drive themselves. Even with the new chip -- which comes with all new vehicles and can be installed in older ones -- Teslas still aren't yet fully capable of driving without human intervention. They now have "all hardware necessary," said Elon Musk, Tesla's chief executive officer. "All you have to do is improve the software." The software will be updated over the air to allow full self-driving by the end of the year, he said.

The first half of 2018 was strong for the workforce optimization (WFO) market in general, up 6.4 percent compared to the first half of 2017, and excellent for the contact center segment, which grew by 24.2 percent during this period. The two market leaders, NICE and Verint, which together accounted for 75.5 percent of the total company GAAP revenue in the WFO suite market in the first half of 2018, each experienced strong revenue growth. NICE's total company revenue increased 9.8 percent in the fiscal first half of 2018 compared to the first half of 2017, and Verint's revenue grew by 11.2 percent in the same period. Based on our ongoing analysis of this market, the first half of 2018 has been good overall for the majority of WFO vendors. Total company revenue for the WFO market in the first half of 2018 was $1.685 billion, up $101.7 million from $1.583 billion in the first half of 2017.

Mention McDonald's to someone today, and they're more likely to think about Big Mac than Big Data. But that could soon change: The fast-food giant has embraced machine learning, in a fittingly super-sized way. McDonald's is set to announce that it has reached an agreement to acquire Dynamic Yield, a startup based in Tel Aviv that provides retailers with algorithmically driven "decision logic" technology. When you add an item to an online shopping cart, it's the tech that nudges you about what other customers bought as well. Dynamic Yield reportedly had been recently valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars; people familiar with the details of the McDonald's offer put it at over $300 million.

China's largest search engine, with 70% of the search market, has been facing deeply negative perceptions and increased competition for advertising from the likes of Tencent's WeChat, China's all-in-one app, and newer arrivals like Bytedance, with its news and short video apps. Nevertheless, Baidu on Feb. 21 beat expectations on fourth-quarter revenues, which came in at $3.96 billion, even as it posted a 50% drop in net profit for the quarter. It recorded $14.88 billion in revenues for the year and $4 billion in net profit, and reported strong growth in users for its mobile app and voice-recognition software. Baidu's heavily reliant on ad earnings for the moment--but it's trying to change that. It has set high goals for developing artificial intelligence, from self-driving cars to personal assistants, in the hopes that it will dominate the field in China and beyond.

Darktrace helped pave the way for using artificial intelligence to combat malicious hacking and enterprise security breaches. Now a new U.K. startup founded by an ex-Darktrace executive has raised some funding to take the use of AI in cybersecurity to the next level. Senseon, which has pioneered a new model that it calls "AI triangulation" -- simultaneously applying artificial intelligence algorithms to oversee, monitor and defend an organization's network appliances, endpoints and "investigator bots" covering multiple microservices -- has raised $6.4 million in seed funding. David Atkinson -- the startup's CEO and founder who had previously been the commercial director for Darktrace and before that helped pioneer new cybersecurity techniques as an operative at the U.K.'s Ministry of Defense -- said that Senseon will use the funding to continue to expand its business both in Europe and the U.S. The deal was co-led by MMC Ventures and Mark Weatherford, who is chief cybersecurity strategist at vArmour (which itself raised money in recent weeks) and previously Deputy Under Secretary for Cybersecurity, U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Others in the round included Amadeus Capital Partners, Crane Venture Partners and CyLon, a security startup incubator in London.

News that Gong.io has acquired $40M to add their existing funding shows they are well on their way to transforming CRM systems with the use of artificial intelligence. Gong.io is relatively new on the scene but is already making big moves in the CRM industry. Their AI-assisted Conversation Intelligence and account analytics platform removes the conjectures and unknowns to assist sales and marketing teams to formulate winning sales strategies. Founded in 2015 by Amit Bendov, CEO, and Eilon Reshef, CTO, the San Francisco and Israel based company has two very successful people at the helm. Both founders have impressive resumes with proven track records in the growing, selling, and IPOing of startups.