I say: Connecting with your audience and improving brand awareness. I say: Revolutionizing B2B sales and lead generation. Siri and Cortana, meet Kylie. Like the virtual assistants that can remind you of your upcoming appointments or give you the score of the game, a company aiming to help automate the mundane parts of the sales process has created an autonomous, machine learning-powered sales rep named Kylie. She can reportedly understand the meaning of sales conversations, performing many of the same functions as an entry-level sales person--except she's not a person.

The highest profile example of AI in operations today is probably the self-driving car. Just riding in the car while my 15-year-old learns how to drive is an incredibly terrifying example of the advanced thought process required to safely operate a car. While those of us who have been driving for decades may take much of the problem solving nature of driving for granted, seeing it navigated in raw form by a teenager lends incredible appreciation for the advanced nature of the technology employed by a self-driving vehicle.

If you've looked into buying smart devices for your home, you've probably seen the "Works with Nest" badge printed on the outside of one of the boxes, considering how many devices are a part of the service. Alphabet has been pushing to make its Nest thermostat the center of everyone's home by getting IoT manufacturers into the program. Thanks to Alphabet's research in machine learning and pattern recognition, the Works with Nest program has gained extra smarts, allowing your other devices to hook into, and react to, more events. Benefitting most from the newfound capabilities are the Nest cameras, including the new Nest Cam Outdoor. Thanks to Alphabet being able to train its image processing on the millions of photos uploaded by Google Photos' 200 million users, the cameras have gained the ability to recognize if the movement it sees in frame is an actual person or something like a car driving by.

"In short, the rise of powerful AI will be either the best or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity," Hawking said this week at the opening of the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence in Cambridge, England. "We do not yet know which." The LCFI, which opened Monday, is part of the University of Cambridge's Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. Their goal is to answer some of the biggest questions facing the rapidly advancing field -- including what it all means, and how to keep AI from killing us. In the past, Hawking has warned that AI could end mankind.

Neurensic, a Chicago-based regtech artificial intelligence (AI) startup, has announced the release of its new SCORE surveillance platform, the trading industry's first compliance solution powered by a cloud-based machine learning architecture which is able to identify complex patterns of trading behavior on a massive scale, across multiple markets in near real time. The FM London Summit is almost here. The development of the new SCORE platform was led by David Widerhorn and Neurensic's CTO, Dr Cliff Click, the inventor of the H2O artificial intelligence framework, the world's fastest distributed machine learning architecture. SCORE combines high-speed, big data processing power with self-adaptive pattern recognition technology, providing firms with a continuous assessment of the compliance risk associated with complex trading behaviours. The firm's recently completed beta release provided clients with surveillance technology for regulators, proprietary trading firms and futures commission merchants, culminating in engagements with larger institutional customers, including broker-dealers and global banks.

Comcast Corp. CEO Brian Roberts said Friday that he believes one of the biggest business trends will be "artificial intelligence," in which computers do tasks once done by people, leading to smart cities and smart cars. He didn't say how he thought artificial intelligence could transform Comcast, but he noted that "there's always a dark side to that kind of change." In a question-and-answer format, Roberts spoke conversationally to about 1,200 executives, lawyers, city and state officials, and others at the annual Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce breakfast . Before Roberts' remarks, Drexel University president John Fry officially took over as the chamber's board chairman, replacing Exelon Corp.'s Dennis O'Brien. Fry said he believed that Philadelphia could be one of the world's 25 top-tier cities, but that civic leaders couldn't be complacent because "as we sit down here for breakfast, [competing cities] are preparing to eat our lunch."

Computers that learn for themselves are with us now. As they become more common in'high-stakes' applications like robotic surgery, terrorism detection and driverless cars, researchers ask what can be done to make sure we can trust them. There would always be a first death in a driverless car and it happened in May 2016. Joshua Brown had engaged the autopilot system in his Tesla when a tractor-trailor drove across the road in front of him. It seems that neither he nor the sensors in the autopilot noticed the white-sided truck against a brightly lit sky, with tragic results.

The classic guide for entrepreneurs preparing a pitch is Sequoia's Business Plan Template. This post aims to be a mere addendum to that in the age of machine learning. Why do investors spend so much time focusing on'differentiation'? Because the job of an investor is to allocate money to its best use. Investors shouldn't allocate money to a company unless it is crystal clear that the company is the best one to solve a particularly valuable problem.

JOINING "Hamilton", a Broadway show, and concerts by Adele, a British soul diva, on the list of tickets-to-kill-for in New York is a screening in an ugly new office building that recently popped-up in the East Village, a place best known for offbeat culture. There is a ten-week-long queue to see simulations by Watson, IBM's cognitive artificial-intelligence platform. Initially known for stunts such as beating human contestants on "Jeopardy!", a quiz show, Watson has been seeking a wider audience. It has found a vast potential one in the world of financial regulation. Rules have become so sprawling and mysterious that even regulators have begun asking for a map.

Yahoo's recently open sourced neural network, open_nsfw, is a fine tuned Residual Network which scores images on a scale of to on its suitability for use in the workplace.