IBM Watson may be coming soon to an enterprise iOS app near you, the company announced at the IBM World of Watson 2016 event on Tuesday. In a first-of-its-kind move, IBM MobileFirst for iOS apps can now integrate Watson technology to enhance decision-making, productivity, and the employee experience. With Watson's cognitive and conversational capabilities, these enterprise apps will be able to understand, reason, and learn using data analytics, according to a press release. "Apple and IBM set out more than two years ago to define the enterprise mobility market, ensuring that professionals could finally enjoy at work the same experience they'd come to expect as consumers," said Mahmoud Naghshineh, general manager, Apple partnership at IBM, in a press release. "We are taking that to a whole new level by combining the power of Watson with the new speech framework of iOS 10. The combinations and possibilities are virtually endless."

When talking about Artificial Intelligence (AI), it is easy to be drawn to the sci-fi storylines. As we've talked about in this blog before, the way Artificial Intelligence is depicted in films or in stories is often very stark and dramatized for theatrical effect. And who can blame Hollywood? "Robots destroy the human race" sells much more tickets than "AI takes over all of humanity's highly repetitive, boring tasks." This dichotomy between humans and AI is a very common theme. An article written by Tracy Wang explores this idea at length: what if the discussion on AI technology was more than just humans versus computers?

The most basic form of competitive analysis is to examine what other companies in your field are doing to meet the needs of customers. While that effort certainly remains relevant, when it comes to online and mobile experiences it's important to remember that your customers are likely comparing your offerings to those of digital-first organizations operating in completely different industries. This is top of mind for technology professionals at Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BofAML), which has tripled its digital budget in 2016. "Our customers don't benchmark us against banks," said Hari Gopalkrishnan, CIO of client-facing platform technology, in an interview with InformationWeek. We spoke with Gopalkrishnan and other BofAML technology executives during the company's 8th Annual Technology Innovation Summit in Menlo Park, Calif., October 19 and 20.

No longer the stuff of speculative fiction, artificial intelligence is on the cusp of disrupting every aspect of how we do our jobs and live our lives. Here are just three ways in which AI is having an impact on the creative industries. It's been proven over and over that the best advertising content is something which provokes an involuntary emotional reaction in the viewer. AI is already being used to edit videos which follow an emotional arc, encompassing a range of different feelings but always ending on a happy or satisfying note. There's even evidence to suggest that AIs are, in fact, better at tugging on our heartstrings than real people.

Computers can now keep SECRETS: Google's neural network is learning to encrypt its own messages Experts like Professor Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk have warned of the dangers of artificial intelligence becoming too smart and turning against humanity. Now it seems a team at Google has brought computing another step towards this nightmare becoming a reality, by teaching its networks to keep secrets. The computer systems have learn how to protect their messages away from prying eyes. Ateam at Google has taught its networks to keep secrets. Just last week, Professor Stephen Hawking warned artificial intelligence could develop a will of its own that is in conflict with that of humanity.

Basic filters are soooo last year, and Google knows it. It's all about turning your mundane pet photos into works of art now, spearheaded by popular mobile app Prisma. Since it launched earlier this year, Prisma's added an offline mode and video support (albeit after a me-too competitor), but just a few days ago Facebook revealed it's also working on style transfer tech for live video -- though Prisma says it's going to beat the social network to the punch in a matter of days. Now, Google has revealed it's going one better, detailing a system that can mix and match multiple art styles to create photo and video filters that are altogether unique. Google is using more or less the same neural network approach as, say, Prisma does. Simply put, algorithms break pictures down into easily understandable parts, "learn" the artistic style of a painting (like the color palette and brush stroke technique), and combine them into a new image.

For a topic that generates so much interest, it is surprisingly difficult to find a concise definition of machine learning that satisfies everyone. Complicating things further is the fact that much of machine learning, at least in terms of its enterprise value, looks somewhat like existing analytics and business intelligence tools. To set the course for this three-part series that puts the scope of machine learning into enterprise context, we define machine learning as software that extracts high-value knowledge from data with little or no human supervision. Academics who work in formal machine learning theory may object to a definition that limits machine learning to software. In the enterprise, however, machine learning is software.

The hype over A.I. and bots shows no signs of simmering down, thanks to accelerating investments, a developer "gold rush," and the ease of building bots. According to Pandorabots, there are more than 225,000 bot developers and upwards of 300,000 bots in existence today. However, a rush like the one to create bots is usually backed up by consumer demand. In this case, there's little to no demand in the form of customers asking brands to adopt bots. In fact, based on BJ Fogg's behavior model, for consumer behavior to shift, the bot needs to be easier to use than the activity it's replacing.

Several of the tech sector's biggest names have come together to form an Artificial Intelligence organisation that will explore the ethics and applications of technology that could transform the entire industry. Amazon, Facebook, Google (DeepMind), IBM and Microsoft are founding members of the'Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society', or'Partnership on AI' for short, and will invite academics, non-profit organisations, specialists in policy and ethics to join the board. Partnership on AI itself is a non-profit organisation and will conduct and publish research on an open licence in areas such as ethics, transparency, privacy, interoperability, reliability and interaction between humans and AI systems. The ultimate stated aim of the alliance is to increase public awareness of AI, maximise the benefits to society, and address various challenges. It says it is not a lobbying organisation and all members will contribute financial and research resources.

Speaking at the DATAVERSITY Smart Data Online 2016 Conference, Adrian Bowles, industry analyst, recovering academic, and founder of STORM Insights, and Steve Ardire, Merchant of Light, both talked about the future of Artificial Intelligence (AI). They addressed the question: "Will robots take my job?" The short answer could be summarized as: "Maybe." Lower level jobs with easily improved productivity are likely candidates for automated replacements, says Bowles, but higher level positions with decision making capacity are more likely to have assistance from AI, rather than being replaced by it. Bowles talked about recently going through the stack of books he used early in his AI studies and discovering that "nowhere in these books is the key phrase'Machine Learning,' and yet today, that's sort of at the center of everything we're doing."