As anyone who's been following iMore for a while know, concerns that Apple was behind when it came to key strategic technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning have been misplaced. Machine learning, my briefers say, is now found all over Apple's products and services. Apple uses deep learning to detect fraud on the Apple store, to extend battery life between charges on all your devices, and to help it identify the most useful feedback from thousands of reports from its beta testers. Machine learning helps Apple choose news stories for you. It determines whether Apple Watch users are exercising or simply perambulating.

The world depends on coral reefs, but they're disappearing – ravaged by climate change, coastal development, overfishing and pollution. With a quarter of Earth's reefs already gone, scientists are racing to save them, and they're getting a big boost from GPU-accelerated deep learning. Although reefs cover less than one percent of the ocean floor, they provide food and shelter for more than a quarter of all marine species, support fish stocks that feed more than a billion people and provide jobs to millions of people in coastal areas. Scientists study images of coral reefs to measure reef health and changes over time. That's now done by human experts, but it's costly and time-consuming.

In this special guest feature, Cecilia Pizzurro, Senior Director, Strategic Data Projects at LOGICnow, discusses the convergence of data/machine learning and cybersecurity, and the idea that these two are playing off of each other in a more meaningful way than ever before. Cecilia leads a team of data scientists and software engineers in Cambridge (US) and Newcastle (UK). These teams use machine learning and big data analytics to find business value in the vast amount of customer data gathered from LOGICnow's products. She was also the co-founder and CTO of the The Dolomite Group, a South American mining consortium, pioneering machine learning and big data analyses to improve mining efficiency and reduce environmental impact in Peru. This company is currently finalizing its acquisition by a Chilean mining company.

If you've watched the television series 24 on Netflix, the online streaming service will recommend that you catch up on Homeland, too. Now, a Boston-based technology firm is hoping to bring that same intuitive technology to financial services. Start-up Indico Data Solutions Inc. announced Friday that it is collaborating with John Hancock Financial and the Boston insurer's Canadian parent Manulife Financial Corp. to help financial analysts and portfolio managers cull through thousands of pieces of data and find the most important information. Based on that data, managers at Manulife and John Hancock will be able to make quicker decisions on whether to invest in certain companies and industries or sell their shares. Think of it as Google on steroids.

Niki, the AI fueled bot, built to make discovery and transactions simple, has launched her chatbot on Messenger. Niki envisions to be the gateway of everything commerce by enabling conversations between brands and consumers. In a single chat interface, she can help you with cab bookings, utility bill payments and mobile recharges, with plans to provide food ordering, flight bookings, hotel reservations and movie ticketing very soon. They are backed by Mr. Ratan Tata and Unilazer Ventures. Having been in development for a year, it has generated significant traction on its Android Application with over 75,000 users.

While humans may be ahead of computers in the ability to create strategy today, we shouldn't be complacent about our dominance. This article is part of an MIT SMR initiative exploring how technology is reshaping the practice of management. Editor's Note: This is the seventh in a special series of commissioned essays MIT Sloan Management Review will be publishing in Frontiers over the Spring and Summer of 2016. Each essay gives the author's response to this question: "Within the next five years, how will technology change the practice of management in a way we have not yet witnessed?" As a society, we are becoming increasingly comfortable with the idea that machines can make decisions and take actions on their own.

Imagine you're a billionaire, with your own film studio. You're sitting there on your golden throne, eating peeled grapes off Channing Tatum's abs. Your assistant has just handed you the script for The Expendables 7 or yet another Spider-Man reboot. Surely, you think yourself, in this data-driven age there has to be a better way. Couldn't we use machine learning to design the optimum new film?

Imagine you're a billionaire, with your own film studio. You're sitting there on your golden throne, eating peeled grapes off Channing Tatum's abs. Your assistant has just handed you the script for The Expendables 7 or yet another Spider-Man reboot. Surely, you think yourself, in this data-driven age there has to be a better way. Couldn't we use machine learning to design the optimum new film?

Starting in the 1980s, technology companies like Apple, Microsoft, and many others presented computer users with the graphical user interface as a means to make technology more user-friendly. The average consumer wasn't going to learn binary code to use a computer, so the great minds at these leading technology companies slapped a screen on technology and offered an interface that provided icons, buttons, toolbars, and other graphical elements so that the computer could be easily consumed by a mass market. Today it's hard to even imagine technological devices without a screen and a graphical presentation -- until now. Early in 2016, we saw the introduction of the first wave of artificial intelligence technology in the form of chatbots. Social media platforms like Facebook allowed developers to create a chatbot for their brand or service so that consumers could carry out some of their daily actions from within their messaging platform.