Surprisingly, concern with the cost of implementing AI is lower on the list at 42 percent. Overall, there is a lack of general understanding around AI technologies available, and how to begin using them. Further education and hands on experience will be required to ensure the use of AI technology to support marketing is successful. "As someone who has been studying AI for many years, I've recognized the promise of AI and B2B marketing for some time, which makes it really rewarding to see this vision is now shared by marketing executives," said Aman Naimat, SVP of Technology at Demandbase. "This data reveals that in order to be successful, marketing leaders need to lead the charge and present opportunities for AI instruction and experience for their teams, to ensure implementing it into their B2B technology stacks is effective."

Ford Motor Co. said Tuesday it was scrapping plans to build a $1.6-billion factory in Mexico and would invest $700 million to expand a Michigan plant to build electric and autonomous vehicles that will add 700 jobs there in a move Ford's chief executive said was a "vote of confidence" in the economic policies of President-elect Donald Trump. Ford isn't abandoning expanded production in Mexico. The company said that to "improve company profitability" it would build its next-generation Ford Focus at an existing plant in Hermosillo, Mexico. But in the wake of criticism by President-elect Donald Trump of the U.S. automaker and other companies moving manufacturing jobs across the border, Ford said it would cancel its plans for a major new plant in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. A company news release didn't mention Trump, but Chief Executive Mark Fields told CNN on Tuesday that the new plans were "a vote of confidence" in the direction of the U.S. economy under the president-elect.

We uncovered the following insights and trends: • Semi-autonomous vehicles are the stepping stone to fully autonomous vehicles. Most car manufacturers and technology companies have taken Tesla's lead and are offering features like self- parking, adaptive cruise control, emergency braking and semi-hands off driving in highway/interstate conditions. Semi-autonomous features help consumers become comfortable with the idea of robots taking the wheel.

Ford Motor Co. said Tuesday it was scrapping plans to build a $1.6-billion factory in Mexico and would invest $700 million to expand a Michigan plant to build electric and autonomous vehicles that will add 700 jobs there in a move Ford's chief executive said was a "vote of confidence" in the economic policies of President-elect Donald Trump. Ford isn't abandoning expanded production in Mexico. The company said that to "improve company profitability" it would build its next-generation Ford Focus at an existing plant in Hermosillo, Mexico. But in the wake of criticism by President-elect Donald Trump of the U.S. automaker and other companies moving manufacturing jobs across the border, Ford said it would cancel its plans for a major new plant in San Luis Potosi, Mexico. A company news release didn't mention Trump, but Chief Executive Mark Fields told CNN on Tuesday that the new plans were "a vote of confidence" in the direction of the U.S. economy under the president-elect.

Ditto Labs, Inc., a pioneer in deep learning announced today that Red Fort Capital led a new round of investment in the vision-as-a-service company. Ditto's vision-as-a-service API can find nearly anything appearing in a photo -- a specific product, brand logo, location, demographic profile -- even subjective measures of sentiment -- in near real time. Ditto's service is a high value AI application for thousands of digital business's. "Humans can no longer keep up: ubiquitous cameras are casting off reams of big data. Today, critical business decisions need computers to act on visual data at massive scale and in real-time," said Red Fort Capital CEO Parry Singh.

Google dispelled any lingering questions about its commitment to cloud in 2016, as its strategy emerged to become a major player in the enterprise market in the years ahead. The company has spent tens of billions of dollars to build the underlying infrastructure, services and talent pool that feed Google Cloud Platform (GCP). As a result, it has de-emphasized price as the main differentiator and instead focused on enterprise demands, data analytics and a set of technologies to drive applications the company said will dominate the industry in the future. Machine learning is still too new for many IT shops, but Google has banked on it as the future of cloud computing. New services added in 2016 included the Machine Intelligence suite of services and new releases for translation, text analysis, and image and speech recognition.

In February MIT Technology Review highlighted 10 breakthrough technologies poised to significantly change the world over the next few years. Here's how they have progressed since then. We predicted that 2016 would bring major progress on high-tech cancer cures enabled by using gene editing to tune the human immune system, and it did. First, American scientists got a green light to start using the gene-editing technique called CRISPR to customize T cells and turn them into cancer killers. That study turned out to have the backing of Internet billionaire Sean Parker, who in April had announced he'd give away $250 million toward "hacking" the immune system. By November, a Chinese company announced it had raced ahead and dosed a patient with the first T cells edited with CRISPR.

Gigaom, the leader in emerging technology research, today announced that it is holding its first annual competition for the AI start-up that delivers the highest ROI to corporate customers. The GAIN competition coincides with the annual conference Gigaom AI Now held in San Francisco, CA, February 15-16th 2017. AI startups are leading the way for bringing positive impacts of AI to many of the world's long-term challenges. "Record number of investments are being made in early stage AI start-ups. The competition will identify which new ventures can deliver the highest ROI to businesses today," explained David Hehman, Gigaom's Start-up & VC editor.

CES 2017, is expected to feature the latest auto technology, including self-driving and concept cars. The show will run from Jan. 5-8 in Las Vegas with Jan. 3 and Jan. 4 being press days. Here's what you can expect to see from automakers at one of technology's biggest events: Ford will reveal its next generation Fusion Hybrid autonomous development car at CES 2017, after giving the public a glimpse of the car in a video before the show. The new vehicle comes with new electrical controls and two 360-degree view LiDAR sensors. The car's updates are focused on its virtual driver system, with the vehicle's brain located in the trunk, the company says.

Salt Lake City-based company Recursion Pharmaceuticals was recognized Tuesday for its drug discovery platform, which combines both the innovation of artificial intelligence and the mystery of experimental biology. Recursion Pharmaceuticals received two Fierce Innovation awards from the biotech and pharmaceutical industries as recognition for their platform, which is said to increase the rate at which drugs can be discovered. "Traditional drug discovery can take more than a decade and billions of dollars per approved compound," Recursion's co-founder and CEO, Chris Gibson, said in a news release. "Recursion's platform can radically increase the scale at which drugs are discovered, saving years of development time and the associated costs." The platform uses tons of microscopic pictures of human cells, including diseased cells and cells that have been treated with different chemicals and drugs, and utilizes image recognition to identify which parts of the cell change when afflicted with a disease or treated with a drug.