Elon Musk, owner of SpaceX, Tesla, and the only guy more Ironman than Rob Downey Jr, worries about smart computers taking over the world. Maybe he's right, but AI (or Artificial Intelligence for those of you acronym fatigued), is already a lot closer to home, says head of strategy at Digital Alchemy, Grant Stewart, in this guest post. I see it every day in my digital marketing life, exposed to machine learning that both scares and comforts me. Here are five ways I see AI racking up big wins in the digital marketing space and why you should be worried if you're on the sidelines: Know what computers do really well? In a world of real time, always on marketing, the ability to constantly learn what content, campaigns, offers, channels, you name it, a customer is engaging with, and conversely not engaging with (read: the Fail Fast bit), means that AI gets smarter and smarter about decisions like what NOT to talk to individual customers about and how NOT to deliver the message.

The most satisfying bots are ones with clear uses, such as the Whole Foods one on Messenger that prompts users for an ingredient then offers recipes, or the Sephora bot on Kik that offers beauty tips based on skin type. One of users' big problems with bots is knowing what they can do. Google Allo solves that with messages that introduce features and capabilities over time. If a query is too much for the bot, it will say the feature isn't available yet, and suggest ones that are. CNN's Messenger bot, which was originally designed to answer general questions about the news, often failed to grasp what users were asking.

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Israeli Artificial Intelligence (AI) startup Chorus.ai The company, which adds AI to sales conversations and learns what works to close more deals, is also launching its flagship platform out of stealth mode after a year in development. With offices in Tel Aviv and San Francisco, Chorus' software combines artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics, and natural language processing (NLP) to unite sales conversations into a single dashboard, helping companies learn what works, and multiply successes across their sales teams. Chorus describes itself as the Waze for sales conversations. Boosted with Natural Language Processing and AI, it helps sales teams learn what to say and what to avoid to route them more quickly to a closed deal.

Chatbots are certainly not a new technology, but the recent surge in interest is playing a very important role in the evolution of artificial intelligence: Chatbots are helping A.I. become publicly accessible and accepted. Even with all the technological advances we have seen over the past few years, there is still a fairly large disconnect between technology and the general public and businesses, particularly in the case of A.I. A.I. has been a taboo subject, an issue that I have had to face and tackle in my personal and business life. From valid concerns about jobs lost through automation, to slightly more existential warnings from Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, to worries raised by films like The Terminator, The Matrix, and I, Robot, A.I. has not had a very good start, with most people fearing the advancements of this life-changing technology. Through chatbots, people have taken a step back from these fears and begun to accept that A.I. is part of our lives now. Although they have been using A.I. in their everyday life for many years on platforms such as Facebook and Google, they haven't seemed to really be aware of it or they have turned a blind eye to it.

Artificial Lawyer spent 12 happy hours at the Legal Geek Conference on Brick Lane in East London yesterday and can confirm to those who might be wondering, that yes, this was the best legal tech event of the year. The success of the event was very much driven by an entrepreneur himself, Jimmy Vestbirk, who created Legal Geek and set the tone from the get-go, with a great Truman Brewery space for the event and mandatory high fives to the attendees sitting on either side. There was also a no ties policy and that deserves a special commendation. What set this event apart from others was that the speakers were the real thing. They were the founders and/or senior staff members of the legal AI companies everyone else is talking about.

We are on the cusp of an exciting -- and unchartered -- new era in technology, where decisions and problem-solving will be aided by smart machines that will sense, learn, infer and even think on behalf of humans. Although not yet mainstream, smart machines are increasingly making appearances in the form of autonomous cars, robots and other cognitive computing systems that are able to solve problems and make decisions without human intervention. Conversational user interfaces are also on the rise, relying on smart technologies and machine learning to facilitate dialogue between people and bots. The proliferation of data and intelligent platforms has become increasingly prevalent and is beginning to shape the way businesses must transform their own organizations to become more agile and adaptive in how they go to market and engage with their customers. Smart machines can help marketers filter out mountains of noise to pinpoint that single piece of insight needed to make a more informed decision.

Microsoft on Tuesday said that its researchers have "made a major breakthrough in speech recognition." In a paper [PDF] published a day earlier, Microsoft machine learning researchers describe how they developed an automated system that can recognize recorded speech as well as a professional transcriptionist. Using the NIST 2000 dataset of recorded calls, Microsoft's software performed slightly (0.4 per cent) better than the error rate the company attributes to professional transcriptionists (5.9 per cent) for the Switchboard portion of the data, in which strangers discuss a specified topic. It saw a similarly narrow margin of success with the CallHome portion of the data – in which family members converse without guidelines – where the human transcription error rate was 11.3 per cent. A month ago, Microsoft's researchers reported that their software had achieved a 6.3 per cent word error rate.

The major-party presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, have spent decades in the public eye as key figures of American culture. Their portraits have covered magazines, newspapers and websites for decades. The major-party presidential candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, have spent decades in the public eye as key figures of American culture. Their portraits have covered magazines, newspapers and websites. Photos: A visual history of virtual reality headsets (it ain't always pretty) p In these heady days of tech innovation it's easy to lose track of what's … A centuries-old Yemeni city stands alongside the gleaming towers of Hong Kong as one of the world's most beautiful architectural views, writes Jonathan Glancey.

With more selection available to online shoppers than ever before, finding items that are perfect for you and your budget can be time consuming. At eBay, our focus is to help shoppers find their version of perfect and simplify the shopping experience. In addition to major enhancements we've been making to our core platform, we've also been hard at work on a new commerce experience powered by artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, and human judgment. We're starting to bring this experience to life with eBay ShopBot, which debuts today in beta on Facebook Messenger. Our vision is to make shopping with eBay as easy as talking to a friend, whether you are looking for something specific or just browsing for inspiration.