Whatever you want to learn, whatever you want to explore or whatever you just plain want to discuss, SXSW Interactive has you covered. This is my fourth time attending SXSW Interactive, and the big themes emerging this week have centered around augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI). For brevity's sake, I'm going to drill down to one area of AI in which I'm particularly excited--bots. To be even more specific, chatbots on messaging apps. As the head of global social strategy and operations at DocuSign, I index for #SXSW talks at which representatives of the social media platforms--especially the ones on which we have a DocuSign branded presence--are speaking so I can keep up with the rapid advancements and, hopefully, stay one step ahead of becoming a marketing dinosaur.

Anyone who has ever tried to contact a company through a representative at a call center knows how slow and frustrating the process can be. Even with upgrades and best practices in customer experience, there isn't much that can be done to improve the situation because in most cases the agent is looking through multiple CRMs and is limited by the speed of the programs they can access. However, new developments in technology have opened doors to a faster, easier solution: chatbots. A chatbot can have a conversation with a customer but isn't limited by technology because the AI technology is built in to the software. In most cases, chatbots use messenger apps to communicate with customers.

Your autonomous car could become an extension of your home. A place to eat breakfast, play video games, or have sex. And figuring out which of these activiites you want to do most in an autonomous car is already on the minds of automotive designers. "I started by comparing with in-flight experiences that everyone knows about," Kota Kobayashi, leader of the Auto digital product design team at Us Two tells Inverse. People don't actually do that much on planes, he said.

Over 150 technologies were considered as part of the PWC Essential Eight Global Megatrends review where technologies with the greatest expected impact over the next 5 to 7 years are identified. Only eight technologies made the list and our review of the technology and example use cases follows. Using computer systems and technology to perform activities that would otherwise require human intelligence. While many people immediately think of futuristic movies with lifelike robots that can interact on a human level, this technology is available today and being used in ways that allow humans to focus on more challenging problems. Forms of artificial intelligence have been around since the 1950's and became popular with large tech companies during the 90's and 00's.

Two-year-old DemandJump Inc. is one of the area's hottest startups--and it had a 2016 that many startups would kill for. Last year, the Indianapolis-based company won two TechPoint Mira awards (often called the Oscars of Indiana tech), was a finalist for the prestigious Red Herring Top 100 Global award, added former Wal-Mart marketing chief Julie Lyle to its team, and secured an investment from Boston-based venture capital heavyweight Bob Davoli. The 17-person company, which targets marketers with its artificial intelligence software, has not raised a ton of money--about $2.6 million so far. But it's approaching $1 million in annualized revenue with a product that's been on the market only nine months. And the company has caught the attention of research firms Forrester and Intelligentsia.

AI is having incredible successes and becoming widely deployed. But this success also leads to a big challenge,

There's so much hype surrounding artificial intelligence you'd think the technology was remarkably advanced. Sure, there are home automation systems that use AI, but really that's all the technology is good for right now: making our lives more convenient. Most AI systems cannot solve complex problems or even make appropriate decisions. Alexa and Siri, for example, may jest a bit with you but they can't actually help you make up your mind -- you still need to do that on your own. It sounds funny to complain about the fact that AI can't solve complex problems or truly take control, but it shows just how "dumb" the technology is currently.

Is your cyber security strategy mature enough to handle a sophisticated threat? Many organizations would likely say no. Skimming and phishing were among the most prevalent hacking techniques. Despite the rising numbers of organizations that are impacted by sophisticated threats, many IT leaders aren't planning to change their security strategies this year. Don't let yourself become another statistic waiting for an attack to happen.

To make it simple, chatbots are automated programs that can simulate conversations with people to answer queries and to execute specific task requests. This technology is called Artificial Intelligence (AI). AI is the ability of machines or computers to imitate human thinking or decision making. Chatbots have been around for quite a while now, but the real progress is their new capacity to adapt to the customer through the Machine Learning (ML) process. The way people interact with AI is going to define a new social norm.

In the spring of 2016, Dr. Jianxiong Xiao -- affectionately known among students and staff as "Professor X" -- said goodbye to his plum professorship at Princeton and his post as the founding director of the school's Computer Vision and Robotics Labs. By the fall of that same year, Xiao, known as something of a risk-taker, had moved himself and his family from New Jersey to Silicon Valley, and raised some modest seed funding for his new startup focused on self-driving cars. His startup, dubbed AutoX, has done its best to stay under the radar to date -- apart from a filing with the California DMV to test self-driving vehicles. The filing officially put the professor's mysterious startup in the company of giants, such as Tesla, Waymo (formerly the Google self-driving car project), Uber, and numerous other big auto companies testing self-driving cars. But Xiao isn't worried about getting run over by the giants, saying that his small team of academics possesses the kind of expertise in computer vision that big corporations just can't match.