Volkswagen, acknowledging the growing automotive importance of machine learning, has acquired a stake in the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). "Artificial intelligence (AI) is a key technology for autonomous driving and therefore an investment in our future," VW Group CEO Matthias Mueller said in a press statement. "We want to forge ahead with AI research in the automotive industry and beyond." VW also hopes its involvement in DFKI, one of the world's biggest AI research institutes, will help it with the digitalization of plants and a range of corporate processes. Many carmakers have been expanding their AI activities as an industry-wide effort to build autonomous vehicles is stretching current computer capacity to its limits.

Transition Between The Current Market And Where The Market Is Going 1.3.3

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said on Alphabet's Q1 earnings call: "In the long run, we will evolve in computing from a mobile-first to an AI-first world". This has prompted various speculation on what an AI-first world will look like. Pichai envisages that it will include "assistive" search, "especially on mobile," suggesting that artificial intelligence (AI) will be the platform for on-demand services accessed from any device – including smartphones. Dave Coplin, chief envisioning officer at Microsoft UK spoke at the AI Summit in London. He believes that AI first (AI as a platform) will "change how people relate to tech and to each other."

Accenture and IPSoft have launched a new practice called Accenture Amelia Practice (AAP), a new business unit aimed at helping clients adopt artificial intelligence in business. Accenture claims that AAP will help organisations in improving their business outcomes and create new growth opportunities. The company said that it will develop an array of go-to-market strategies, solutions and consulting service offerings for the deployment of virtual agent technology for clients across several industries. In the initial stages, the business unit will cater to clients in banking, insurance and travel industries with its virtual agent technology. Accenture chief technology officer, Paul Daugherty said: "Artificial intelligence is maturing rapidly and offers great potential to reshape the way that organisations conduct business and interact with their customers and employees. "At the same time, executives are overwhelmed by the plethora of technologies and many products that are advertising AI or Cognitive capabilities.

Tata Sons chairman emeritus Ratan Tata and Unilazer Ventures founder Ronnie Screwvala has invested an undisclosed amount in artificial intelligence-powered chat app Niki.ai. The company said it would use the funds to strengthen its technology and increase the base of partner businesses. Sachin Jaiswal, chief executive officer of Niki.ai, said, "It's a proud moment for the company to have an investment from Tata and for Unilazer to do a follow-on round. With the continued support from our investors, we now want to expand aggressively across categories." Niki uses the method of natural language processing, which enables machines to understand human language inputs, and machine learning, wherein the machine self-learns with increasing data to converse with the customers over a chat interface and helps them to place various orders.

Google has done well out of its search box. As our collective dependence on computers and the Internet has grown, we have come to use it more and more--helping Google swell to its gigantic size. But on Wednesday Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai, said it was time to move on from the conventional search engine that his company was built on. He unveiled Google Assistant, an evolution of Google search designed to act like a virtual concierge. If you search Google for "movies tonight" on your phone today, it will display the films in local theaters.

Uber has announced that it is in the early stages of testing self-driving car technology with the ultimate goal of removing the need for drivers from its ride-hailing business. The company, currently valued at somewhere upwards of 60 billion, announced it has begun testing a Ford Fusion retro-fitted with sensors and cameras on the streets of Pittsburgh. "Real-world testing is critical to our efforts to develop self-driving technology," the company said in a blog post announcing the move. "Self-driving cars have the potential to save millions of lives and improve quality of life for people around the world." The tests will be run by Uber's Advanced Technologies Center, which the company opened in Pittsburgh in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University in February last year, with the goal of inducting autonomous vehicles into its fleet by 2020.

RED SAP Solutions has announced that it is working with SAP on a project that will apply Machine Learning to the recruitment process. The company states that this will transform the process of finding the right candidates, by using artificial intelligence to recommend the best match for any open position. According to RED, it will use the Machine Learning based solution to improve the service it offers to its clients, enabling them to cut time to hire and recruit the best people more quickly, and therefore reduce cost to hire. Together with the expertise and experience of RED's staff, this means its clients will be able to find the best SAP resources for their projects, anywhere in the world. Machine Learning based algorithms, together with RED's vast pool of data, will recommend on what makes a candidate right for a particular position.

A year ago, when Google began to unwind Google, it felt like a positive sign for the company's underperforming social efforts. After sinking years into building a product overstuffed with photos, communication tools, link-sharing, and discussions, Google began to shrink them into more manageable tools. The results were largely positive. Google Photos has become a monster with 200 million monthly users, the company said during its I/O keynote. And communities evolved into a more modern take on message boards, emerging last week as a new mobile app called Spaces.

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