Despite being in development for decades, artificial intelligence (AI) has made leaps and bounds in the past several years, largely thanks to the availability of mass amounts of data and cheap computing power. While data is a good thing for sales, processing it without the right tools can lead to information overload. Fortunately, there are now some innovative AI tools that allow businesses to leverage data for better efficiency. One exciting way companies are using AI is in their sales and marketing departments. Here are a variety of the ways in which artificial intelligence influences sales today and will do so in the future.

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has claimed that the streaming giant's biggest rivals aren't Amazon, YouTube or even traditional broadcasters. According to Mr Hastings, our need for sleep is actually its main barrier. "You know, think about it, when you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night," he said. Mr Hastings stopped short of announcing a new technology capable of helping us recharge without snoozing, though he did go on to make some surprising comments about downloads. The company bowed to pressure by launching the much-requested offline viewing feature last year, but Mr Hastings doesn't think much of it.

Wells Fargo & Company is testing a "chatbot", an automated program that can communicate with the bank's customers on Facebook's messaging platform to give them information on their accounts and help them reset their passwords. The US bank said on Tuesday that it is piloting the virtual assistant with several hundred employees, and plans to extend testing to a few thousand customers later this spring. Wells Fargo's chatbot will use artificial intelligence to respond to natural language messages from users, such as how much money they have in their accounts, and where the nearest bank ATM is. Chatbots have risen in popularity in finance and other industries over the past few months because recent improvements in artificial intelligence have made them better at interacting and interpreting human language. Banks and other financial firms are hopeful chatbots can be used to provide better and continuous customer service at a fraction of the cost of large call centres populated by humans.

Years ago, science fiction movies used to seem very futuristic to us - making us feel detached from the remarkable innovations we saw from scene to scene. However, what once seemed impossible is now a reality and we're slowly but surely learning to live with disruptive technologies. This quote perfectly encapsulates this: Figure 1: What does AI mean for legislation? The EU are moving fast. "humankind stands on the threshold of an era when ever more sophisticated robots, bots, androids and other manifestations of artificial intelligence ("AI") seem poised to unleash a new industrial revolution, which is likely to leave no stratum of society untouched" This could well be the introductory "Star Wars style" text of a science fiction film that is shown to the audience to understand the context of the movie.

A employee uses his mobile phone as he walks past the company logo of Baidu at its headquarters in Beijing, August 5, 2010. The project is named Apollo after the lunar landing program, the Chinese search giant said, adding it would work with partners who provide vehicles, sensors and other components for the new technology. As part of its push into artificial intelligence (AI), the company in January named former Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) executive Qi Lu as chief operating officer. Two months after the appointment, Baidu's chief scientist Andrew Ng, who led AI and augmented reality (AR) projects, said he would step down. The company also launched a $200 million fund in October to focus on AI, AR and deep learning, followed by a $3 billion fund announced in September to target mid- and late- stage start-ups.

An exciting new script analysis product that uses artificial intelligence to help you understand your screenplay better. We at the Black List are big fans of technology and data. We believe that when interpreted correctly, they can provide critical and objective insights into the world. And since we're also passionate about giving writers tools to help them improve their work, we've partnered with ScriptBook on a new product, an artificial intelligence (AI) based script analysis tool that provides feedback to feature film writers on their scripts. ScriptBook is a technology company that uses machine learning and natural language processing to learn about film scripts.

Last September, when the 20th Century Fox sci-fi thriller Morgan premiered, artificial intelligence (AI) took center stage for the first time not as a plot point but a tool. The film studio revealed that it had used IBM's Watson -- a supercomputer endowed with AI capabilities -- to make the movie's trailer. IBM research scientists "taught" Watson about horror movie trailers by feeding it 100 such trailers, cut into scenes. Watson then analyzed the data, from the point of view of visuals, audio and emotions, to "learn" what makes a horror trailer scary. Then the scientists fed in the entire 90-minute Morgan.

In this paper, we propose a new Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) architecture. The novelty is simple: We use diagonal recurrent matrices instead of full. This results in better test likelihood and faster convergence compared to regular full RNNs in most of our experiments. We show the benefits of using diagonal recurrent matrices with popularly used LSTM and GRU architectures as well as with the vanilla RNN architecture, on four standard symbolic music datasets.

Getting the perfect music recommendation is a challenging task. Who has never dreamt of laying back and listening to some music, while having no buttons to press at all and still getting the perfect tune? But what defines this perfect tune? Deezer is a music streaming app, also available on the web. It proposes more than 43 million tracks and is available in more than 180 countries, through a free limited service and a premium offer.

Intel launched its new global business-to-business (B2B) marketing campaign starring "The Future" and recurring actor Jim Parsons, and focusing on sectors where Intel technology is building the future, such as artificial intelligence and autonomous driving. The campaign includes two commercials featuring "The Future" as a character representing how Intel technology empowers businesses to face the future with confidence. "The new campaign brings to life the idea that at Intel, we know the future, because we're building it," said Steve Fund, senior vice president and chief marketing officer at Intel Corporation. "We'll showcase the advances we're making in emerging technologies today to make the future of business even more amazing." Intel recently conducted research among senior business leaders, which revealed a universal anxiety about what the future will bring and a fear of being outpaced by emerging technologies.