There are plenty of nerdy things that Google's search engine can do, and the latest is a peach if you're a graphic designer. If you type in "RGB to Hex," you'll be shown a color converter that'll let you pick a shade and get the RBG and Hex values for both. In addition, you can hit the Show Color Values toggle and get a breakdown of the HSV, HSL and CMYK counts for those shades. Yes, it's not the most useful feature in the world, but it'll save you having to open up Photoshop just to get a color value for your web design project.

Salesforce is more than a standalone company: It's also central to an eco-system of many smaller firms that feed utilities and functions into the SaaS-based CRM app. So when Salesforce announced Einstein--its application of artificial intelligence to all aspects of its CRM--some eco-system partners took note, and wondered what the future held for them. "There is a lot to be said for its potential, shifting companies like ours from traditional communications, from one-to- one to one-to- many. In Five9's case, the specialty is providing a cloud-based "contact center", which can round up, analyze and present customer data to its call-center clients. "Salesforce is great at tracking digital interactions," Anadkat said. "When we play into Salesforce, we plug to our ability to take and receive calls." Salesforce is a "system of record" for many companies. "We're a system of interaction" Anadkat added. Imagination has no technical limit. It is easy to conjecture a system where a bot, backed by Salesforce Einstein, can respond to a caller's needs, artificially cognizant of a caller's record with that business. Yet the technology may not be there yet. "When a live person is getting involved, you have more context," Anadkat said. Callers still want human contact. Artificial intelligence can automate routine tasks and simply repeated interactions, he explained. Yet there still remains a clear-cut boundary between simple interactions and complex ones. Where AI shows promise is interaction between companies and applications. Anadkat offered a use case to illustrate his point. That customer's data is cross-linked with his Uber ride from the airport and with the hotel he is staying at, providing a seamless experience that works. That traveler goes from city to city without any complication. What will be the impact of AI on Five9? "We're peripherally involved in it," Anadkat said. "We're a customer care company, augmenting our ability to connect with AI in a care scenario." Call routing to call centers and backing that up with data is what Five9 will be about. "That's the core of our business,' Anadkat said.

Last week, Microsoft took the unusual step of placing its Cortana and Bing product teams inside the same organization as Microsoft Research. The new Microsoft AI and Research Group will be led by computer vision pioneer and executive vice president Harry Shum, whose 20-year Microsoft career involves leading Bing's search efforts from 2007 through 2013 and helping launch Microsoft Research China. We asked Shum how this new organization will benefit Microsoft's digital assistant in the following interview, which has been edited for length and clarity. The language of the blog post announcing the formation of Microsoft's new AI division, together with how Satya Nadella has characterized it, suggests that Microsoft thinks it's in a space race of sorts when it comes to artificial intelligence. I just feel that the timing's right to go big on AI.

Google is teaching machines to play Atari games like Space Invaders, Video Pinball, and Breakout. At DeepMind, a Google subsidiary based in Cambridge, England, researchers have built artificial intelligence software that's so adept at these classic games, it can sometimes beat a human player--and a professional, at that. This may seem like a frivolous, if intriguing, pursuit. If a machine can learn to navigate the digital world of a video game, Google says, it eventually could learn to navigate the real world, too. Today, this AI can play Space Invaders.

Major technology firms are racing to infuse smartphones and other internet-linked devices with software smarts that help them think like people. The effort is seen as an evolution in computing that allows users to interact with machines in natural conversation style, telling devices to tend to tasks such as ordering goods, checking traffic, making restaurant reservations or searching for information. The artificial intelligence (AI) component in these programs aims to make create a world in which everyone can have a virtual aide that gets to know them better with each interaction. Google Google is making a high-profile push into AI, with the internet titan's chief referring to it as a force for change as powerful as powerful as smartphones. Google Assistant software is being built into new Pixel handsets -- aiming to outdo Apple's Siri -- enabling users to organise and use information on the devices and in the cloud -- to check emails, stay up to date on calendar appointments, news or ask for traffic and weather data.

Singapore-based Nugit promises analysts 50-80% less time spent "extracting, cleaning and combining" data when using its artificial intelligence-enhanced reports The Singapore-based Nugit (a play on "nuggets," of data) announced on Thursday that it raised 5.2 million from Sequoia India, with the goal of doubling its staff and expanding its client base in the near future for a market that will be worth over 185 billion in 2017. This is their first public round of financing, though they raised an undisclosed seed round in March 2015. Nugit's core services center around its work in "natural language generation" (NLG), an artificial intelligence process first developed in the 1990s to automate weather forecasts. NLG works differently from other types of machine learning linguistics because, "NLG systems start with a set of ideas locked in data and turn them into into language that, in turn, communicates them." The goal of this interactive information access is to draw out trends and patterns for reports quickly and clearly, using preprogrammed conditional prompts to review large data sets. Marketing and advertising companies, for instance, want to collect data that can compare data on campaign spending, sales, and reach.

He's a lightning-fast learner, he speaks eight languages and he's considered an expert in multiple fields. He's got an exemplary work ethic, is a speed reader and finds insights no one else can. On a personal note, he's a mean chef and even offers good dating advice. Named after IBM's first CEO, Watson was born back in 2007 as part of an effort by IBM Research to develop a question-answering system that could compete on the American quiz show "Jeopardy." Since trouncing its human opponents on the show in 2011, it has expanded considerably.

With improvements in cloud technology spreading like wildfire, small businesses are in a position where they can take advantage of these advancements. They can leverage tools that will help them run their business more effectively from anywhere at anytime, gain real-time insights into their performance and streamline their selling and customer service initiatives. Considering almost half of small businesses don't have a website, maybe not all businesses are utilizing the wealth of smart technologies at their disposal. Here are three to get you started. For small business owners, being awake used to be the prerequisite for making money.

Major technology firms are racing to infuse smartphones and other internet-linked devices with software smarts that help them think like people. The effort is seen as an evolution in computing that allows users to interact with machines in natural conversation style, telling devices to tend to tasks such as ordering goods, checking traffic, making restaurant reservations or searching for information. The artificial intelligence (AI) component in these programs aims to make create a world in which everyone can have a virtual aide that gets to know them better with each interaction. Google is making a high-profile push into AI, with the internet titan's chief referring to it as a force for change as powerful as powerful as smartphones. Google Assistant software is being built into new Pixel handsets -- aiming to outdo Apple's Siri -- enabling users to organize and use information on the devices and in the cloud -- to check emails, stay up to date on calendar appointments, news or ask for traffic and weather data.