Every company wants to find ways to be more relevant in their customers' lives, whether that means making their online shopping experience more personalized or providing exceptional service. When Domino's Pizza introduced Amazon Echo ordering capabilities, it addressed a tangible consumer benefit: the ability to order their favorite pie without lifting a finger. Domino's is just one example of how companies are using artificial intelligence (AI) to drive consumer engagement and awareness by offering a discrete utility to customers. While AI might feel like a fringe -- and perhaps somewhat futuristic -- marketing tactic, home devices like Amazon Echo (now in 8 million homes) and Google Home are bringing these types of experiences to the mainstream. With more consumers springing for home assistant products, forward-thinking companies are identifying new and novel ways to fit into their consumers' lives.

Salesforce and IBM announce a strategic global partnership aimed to jointly deliver Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions. This AI partnership is designed to influence the way companies make decisions smarter and quicker than ever before. IBM Watson, the AI platform introduced by IBM and Salesforce's AI platform Einstein will seamlessly integrate to empower AI and take it to a new level across sales, marketing, service, commerce, and other customer engagement channels. In the long run, IBM will enable its clients to deploy the combination of Watson and Salesforce Einstein to make smart and informed business decisions. Together, Watson and Einstein will bring new insights from the former directly into the latter.

The position of Chief Digital Officer at global companies has been around more than five years. There were 2,500 CDOs worldwide at the end of 2016, according to one estimate. Not surprisingly, the definition of what a CDO does has grown fuzzy. But in a recent conversation, an executive at a major customer captured the CDO's job description in a single sentence: "Sure, we're always looking for great solutions," he told me, "but more than that, we're looking for a partner who can paint a picture of what the future looks like, and work with us to create it." The Chief Digital Officer is a company's Chief Storyteller.

How would search engine evolve in the next 10 years? When we talk about search engines today, search boxes and search results come to our minds. What might future search engines look like? But we would be happy to have a much more powerful search engine that we may see, hear and even feel in different scenarios, different products or different interfaces. Firstly, deeper understanding of user's intent, deeper understanding of content and more accurate matching of intent and content would empower the search engine. The understanding of user's intent will depend not only on a single query, but also on more comprehensive search contexts, including query sessions, time, location, device, and the user's personalization features.

This shift was underlined on Monday when Intel said it would pay $15.3 billion to acquire Mobileye, an Israeli company that makes chips and cameras for cars and trucks, including the self-driving variety. The purchase will be Intel's second largest ever, following its $16.7 billion billion acquisition of chip-maker Altera in 2015. The Altera buy was also driven, in part, by the recent rise of machine learning, where machine learn can discrete tasks on their own. These are enormous acquisitions in many respects. After acquiring Mobileye, Intel will move its autonomous driving team to the Mobileye's headquarters, not vice versa.

Technology innovations meet greatest success in business when these are entirely'client focussed'. Developments in the retail sector, which is consumer-led, are addressing client demand for more personalised, faster and competitive services. Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Sentiment Analysis are changing the way in which these services are offered. In particular Financial Organisations are creating and leveraging such innovation in the domain of wealth management. This trend is now being taken on board by multiple innovators: academia, start-ups, technology companies and financial market participants.

The automobile is being dismantled, reimagined, and rebuilt in Silicon Valley. Intel's proposed $15.3 billion acquisition of Mobileye, an Israeli company that supplies carmakers with a computer-vision technology and advanced driver assistance systems, offers a chance to measure the scale of this rebuild. In particular, it shows how valuable on-the-road data is likely to be in the evolution of automated driving. While the price tag might seem steep, especially with so many players in automated driving today, Mobileye has some key technological strengths and strategic advantages. It's also developing new technologies that could help solidify this position.

Machine learning is more than the new buzzword on Buzzfeed; it has the potential to spearhead another digital upheaval, transforming the way humans interact with technology, and the way ecommerce does business. Any business that relies on ecommerce needs to know about digital trends -- how Google's Panda updates changed SEO, how social media changed digital advertising. But machine learning is a new and even more influential beast than either of these, because it will impact everything. We take a look at some of the most impactful results of machine learning, real groundbreaking algorithms, some of which have already shaped the world of ecommerce today, some of which are only beginning to spread to the far reaches of the web in 2017. The simplest form of machine learning has been around since PageRank.

Chatbots are exploding in the finance industry, and it's no surprise why. With the ability to automate operations, reach more customers, and provide a more friction-free banking experience, chatbots are streamlining and optimizing many banks' digital services. Here's how the world's biggest banks are using chatbots to boost their business. As one of the largest U.S. banks, Bank of America (BofA) is leading the charge for artificially intelligent chatbots in financial services. Last year, the company announced Erica, a voice- and text-enabled chatbot for BofA customers.

Since my childhood, I have been working towards my goal of building human-level AI. But I had two main areas of interest – game programming and artificial intelligence. I spent my days and nights developing various real-time algorithms for computer graphics, aiming for a career in game development. This period deepened my understanding of programming and computer architectures. I learned how to invent new algorithms, to optimize the code on a machine level, to use math and physics to simulate the world, to develop game engines and to do art, game design, and sound design.