IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) yesterday announced a global strategic partnership to deliver joint solutions designed to leverage artificial intelligence and enable companies to make smarter decisions, faster than ever before. With the partnership, IBM Watson, the leading AI platform for business, and Salesforce Einstein, AI that powers the world's #1 CRM, will seamlessly connect to enable an entirely new level of intelligent customer engagement across sales, service, marketing, commerce and more. IBM is also strategically investing in its Global Business Services capabilities for Salesforce with a new practice to help clients rapidly deploy the combined IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein capabilities. The partnership will bring new insights from Watson directly into the Salesforce Intelligent Customer Success Platform, combining deep customer insights from Salesforce Einstein with Watson's structured and unstructured data across many sources and industries including weather, healthcare, financial services and retail. Together, Watson and Einstein will ingest, reason over and derive recommendations to accelerate decision making and drive greater customer success.

AI is rapidly creeping its way into the software we use on a daily basis. Everything from CRM to Account Based Marketing (ABM) to marketing automation is getting "smarter." The promise of AI powered systems to suggest qualified leads to a B2B sales person is very exciting. One aspect of AI that is very exciting is its ability to tap into unstructured data to learn more about prospects as they engage with a brand's digital channels. Examples of unstructured data include online engagement such as tweets, comments, likes, shares, etc. Think about the potential for smarter systems to reduce much of the heavy lifting associated with identifying qualified sales opportunities.

Initial research projects include collaborations with Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, the University at Buffalo, the University of Connecticut, and the U.K.-based materials science company Ilika. TRI is also in ongoing discussions with additional research partners. "This represents a fantastic opportunity to drastically advance the use of databases and machine learning methods in materials discovery," said Jens Norskov, Professor at Stanford University and director of the SUNCAT center. "The partnership combines theory, computation and experiment in an unprecedented, concerted effort. We are particularly excited by prospects for an avant-garde approach to catalyst development for fuel cells."

March 29, 2017 -- Interop ITX, the independent conference for tech leaders, today announced new artificial intelligence (AI) components created to further the education of its IT community. This year's event will explore both the education and practical application of AI through the all new Data & Analytics track, AI Theater and Demo Showcase, and The Future of Data Summit. AI content will explore a range of areas from business strategy and case studies, to specific tasks and application usage. Interop ITX will take place May 15 – 19, 2017 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, NV. For more information and to register, please visit: interop.com/.

AI is rapidly creeping its way into the software we use on a daily basis. Everything from CRM to Account Based Marketing (ABM) to marketing automation is getting "smarter." The promise of AI powered systems to suggest qualified leads to a B2B sales person is very exciting. One aspect of AI that is very exciting is its ability to tap into unstructured data to learn more about prospects as they engage with a brand's digital channels. Examples of unstructured data include online engagement such as tweets, comments, likes, shares, etc. Think about the potential for smarter systems to reduce much of the heavy lifting associated with identifying qualified sales opportunities.

Pizza company Domino's teased a driverless delivery robot back in 2015, and now it will be a reality for some customers. Domino's is using a fleet of autonomous robots built by Starship Technologies to deliver pizza in European cities, Starship announced Wednesday. The robots, which are different from the previously teased vehicle, will deliver pizzas within a one-mile radius around a Domino's locations in selected cities in the Netherlands and Germany. Domino's Group CEO Don Meij said the robot delivery units will "complement" the company's current delivery methods, such as cars, scooters and e-bikes. He added that the partnership between the pizza company and Starship makes regular robot deliveries one step closer to reality.

TP-Link has announced that its slew of smart home products now have support for Google's intelligent assistant Google Assistant. Hence, consumers may now control their TP-Link smart devices using Google Home and the Pixel handsets as these come with Google Assistant. Among the many home products of TP-Link, the company pointed out that the TP-Link Smart Wi-Fi Bulbs, Smart Wi-Fi Switches and the Smart Plugs are now controllable using voice commands for Google Assistant. The smart light bulbs respond to certain commands like switching on and off and decreasing or increasing the brightness of the light. For bulbs that have color options, users may switch from one color to another using voice commands as well.

AI is rapidly creeping its way into the software we use on a daily basis. Everything from CRM to Account Based Marketing (ABM) to marketing automation is getting "smarter." The promise of AI-powered systems to suggest qualified leads to a B2B sales person is very exciting. One aspect of AI that is very exciting is its ability to tap into unstructured data to learn more about prospects as they engage with a brand's digital channels. Examples of unstructured data include online engagement such as tweets, comments, likes, shares, etc. Think about the potential for smarter systems to reduce much of the heavy lifting associated with identifying qualified sales opportunities.

FinTech Studios(TM), the leading network of artificial intelligence-based financial information, FinTech apps and big-data analytics operated in partnership with dozens of top FinTech software companies, data providers and financial institutions, announced today a strategic partnership with OpenExchange Inc. to integrate their product offerings and provide distribution of each other's solutions to existing clients. This unique partnership enables financial market participants to access both FinTech Studios' financial content and big data analytics, and OpenExchange's video conference capabilities, through a single sign-on process. Under the agreement, FinTech Studios users can access OpenExchange's patented videoconference technology, currently being used by many of the largest financial institutions in the world. FinTech Studios users can seamlessly navigate from its advanced AI-based news, research and market analytics application to OpenExchange's video platform, making financial news and information more actionable than ever before. Users can engage in video calls securely with participants inside and outside the combined user bases of OpenExchange and FinTech Studios.

Google announced today that even more smart home devices would now be compatible with Assistant. The Assistant, accessible from the Google Home hub and Android phones, is integral to Google's expansion into the Internet of Things: Today, we're introducing new home automation integrations--in addition to the ones that already exist--that work with the Google Assistant. So you can now connect your Google Assistant to Best Buy Insignia, LIFX, TP-Link and Wink. TNW Conference won best European Event 2016 for our festival vibe. See what's in store for 2017.