Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff isn't just predicting that artificial intelligence will one day help run everyone's companies, he's already using it at Salesforce today. He's got a special, not-yet-released version of Einstein, the company's artificial intelligence tech baked into its products, helping him run his company, he told Wall Street analysts on Thursday during the company's quarterly conference call. He invites this version of Einstein, called Einstein Guidance, to his Monday morning staff meeting, where up to 30 top executives update him on their progress for the quarter. Einstein Guidance is designed to do forecasting and modeling. It's especially useful to make sure that managers aren't trying to snow him.

Retail and e-commerce is one of the most competitive industries. Besides some of the more major players such as eBay, Amazon, Walmart, and Target, thousands of smaller eCommerce products have flooded the market. In order to stand out among your competitors, win more customers, and, as a result, increase your revenue, you should keep an eye on the latest technological advancements. By adopting new technologies within your retail business, you will be able to grow your sales, increase brand awareness and customer loyalty, and improve your customer service. This is only the tip of the iceberg.

A few weeks ago the new U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin took some public flak for suggesting, in response to an interviewer's question, that he was "not worried at all" that artificial intelligence would threaten the jobs of human workers, because in his view it is "50 or 100 years away." It's not clear why Mnuchin would say that, but with respect, I have to correct him. The original question to Mnuchin was rooted in popular worries that AI will eliminate jobs in the near future. However there's growing evidence that as companies embrace AI to stay competitive, which they will, in the end these changes will create more jobs than they destroy. Earlier this year, ServiceNow commissioned a survey of senior executives at 1,874 companies of varying sizes across numerous industries in seven global markets.

The focus of the research is with the application of deep-learning methods to produce an automated algorithm designed to detect diabetic retinopathy from the scanning of images of the eye. The technology is a type of'deep learning'. Deep Learning is a new area of machine learning research, which has been introduced with the objective of moving Machine Learning closer to one of its original goals: 'true' Artificial Intelligence. The algorithm is based on more than 75,000 images, taken from the back of the eye, and relating to a wide range of patients representing several ethnicities. The images included a mix of health patients and those with the condition.

In 1950, Alan Turing published his famous paper titled "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". The paper proposed a test to determine if a machine was artificially intelligent. Basically, Turing said that if a machine could have a conversation with a human and trick the human into thinking the machine was a person itself, then it was artificially intelligent. This became known as the Turing Test, and passing it has been one of the most sought after goals in computer science. Passing the Turing Test would signal the birth of artificial intelligence.

Food delivery company DoorDash says personalized restaurant recommendations based on AI are seeing a significant lift in orders, compared to regular recommendations based on popularity. In an interview with VentureBeat, DoorDash product manager Jimmy Liu said customers who saw personalized recommendations on average "were over 25 percent more likely" to place an order versus people who saw the most popular restaurants in their area. We talked with Liu on the eve of the company's announcement today that it's rolling out these machine-learning based recommendations to all of its users, after testing it on increasing percentages of its customer base. Millions of users have already seen the recommendations, the company said. Liu said the 25 percent lift from recommendations came specifically from email campaigns.

A world renowned pioneer in social robotics, Cynthia Breazeal splits her time as an Associate Professor at MIT, where she received her PhD and founded the Personal Robots Group, and Founder and Chief Scientist of Jibo, a personal robotics company with over $85 million in funding. While Breazeal's work has won numerous academic awards, industry accolades, and media attention, she had to fight early skepticism in the 1990s from other experts in robotics and AI. At the time, robots were seen as physical and industrial tools, not social or emotional companions. Her first social robot, Kismet, was unfairly called out in popular press as "useless". Breazeal bucked the trend with a very different vision: "I wanted to create robots with social and emotional intelligence that could work in collaborative partnership with people. In 2-5 years, I see social robots helping families with things that really matter, like education, health, eldercare, entertainment, and companionship." She hopes her work and influence will inspire others to create robots "not only with smarts, but with heart, too."

In our previous tutorial on customer support bots, we trained a bot using the Custom Collection API to direct customers to the team member who is best suited to assist them with their problem or query. The bot improved our team's response times as we no longer had to rely on a human facilitator (who also plays many other roles in our company #startuplife) to do the job. However, we're generally only able to respond during our office hours of 11am-7pm EST, so there's still lag for inquiries outside of that period. How can we improve this? Build a bot to answer frequently asked questions, reducing lag time for more customers and ensuring our engineers don't need to spend more time than necessary away from the products we're building for you:).

Machine learning dramatically improves decision making via sophisticated predictive analytics that learns patterns from historical data. Led by Data Scientists, predictive analytics is enabling companies to transform their business through these initiatives. But Data Scientists are in short supply and this shortage is preventing businesses from realizing the full potential to derive value from their data. In this webinar, you'll see how DataRobot automates predictive modeling to deliver a productivity boost to your machine learning endeavors.

Every day we see a new news report on how AI is changing the future of every part of society,