For our non-US readers, March Madness is a nickname given to NCAA Men's and Women's Basketball Tournaments. It is a sports phenomenon that is very popular in the US. The affliction causes many people to fill a bracket to predict who will win at each stage. Offices typically have a March Madness pool, with the winner getting the prize. New KDnuggets Cartoon looks at what happens when AI masters the March Madness.

Dennis Anselmo was glad he used an Apple Watch -- it saved his life when it spotted a dangerous heart condition. A range of studies already exist that prove Apple Watch can identify heart problems, but when its data is coupled with deep learning systems it can achieve much more. Having already built the world's most accurate wearable heart monitor, Apple's sensor development teams must now be exploring new sensor technologies. There have been claims these include a non-invasive diabetes sensor. We know the company's commitment to the sector runs deep.

As if the big data hype of the recent years wasn't enough, artificial intelligence (AI) is now taking over the scene: the media paints pictures of an AI revolution in the consumer world; there are professional AI conferences for every business area; more and more companies now position themselves as AI-based, or have announced their newly-formed AI strategies. Of course, this has spurred c-level executives across multiple industries to ask themselves this question – "what does the AI hype mean for me and my company?" As so often happened with big data projects, the CFO will wonder whether this new technology will become yet another IT spend that carries no clear financial outcome. Well, we have some good news. When implemented properly, AI is actually the CFO's best friend.

Machine learning is a trending topic today and for good reason. It has enormous potential to transform entire markets and industries. Successful machine-learning startups will be the ones targeting vertical applications with a clear need for the technology. The consumer packaged goods industry is a good example. Machine learning can more accurately predict inventory levels to better manage the supply chain, reduce inventory costs, minimize excess capacity requirements, and eliminate stockouts.

Can Villanova repeat as national champs? Is this finally Gonzaga's year? How far will Northwestern go? If you really want help with your NCAA Men's Basketball Championship bracket, go ask Bing. The folks at the Microsoft search engine say they use "intelligent machine-learning technology to analyze social and search signals" in making their March Madness bracket a better bet than the one filled out by your kid.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning will improve sales and marketing by enabling processes and communication without continuous direction. The addition of voice-first systems could eliminate much of the power of'push marketing'. Marketing and advertising have been around since the dawn of the Sumerian culture over 6,000 years ago. Marketing methods will be fundamentally altered with the rise of artificial intelligence, chatbots and the emergence of voice-first communication systems. Cloud computing provides an exponential increase in processing power, while advanced analytics has provided new ways to move from data to insight.

Machines, you may have heard, are coming for all the jobs. Artificial intelligence handles insurance claims and basic bookkeeping, manages investment portfolios, does legal research, and performs basic HR tasks. Human labor doesn't stand a chance against them--after the "automation apocalypse," only those with spectacular abilities and the owners of the robots will thrive. But before you start campaigning for a universal basic income and set up a bunker, you might want to also familiarize yourself with the competing theory: In the long run, we're going to be just fine. Our modern fear that robots will steal all the jobs fits a classic script. Nearly 500 years ago, Queen Elizabeth I cited the same fear when she denied an English inventor named William Lee a patent for an automated knitting contraption.

Fans of the innovative HBO series "Westworld" -- a futuristic tale of life-like robots mixing with guests of a Wild West-styled adult theme park -- can hear Wednesday about how close such technology is from a Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor involved in artificial intelligence research for the U.S. military. "'Westworld' is an HBO series that deals with the'big questions' of artificial intelligence (AI) in an undeniably vivid and timely way," said Selmer Bringsjord, director of the RPI Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning Lab. "The real world will ineluctably move toward giving experiences to humans in environments that are at once immersive and populated with sophisticated AIs and robots." Currently, Bringsjord is working on a multi-million dollar AI development project with support from the U.S. Office of Naval Research, which wants to advance military robotics for logistics and other missions. His work focuses on how to program a form of moral sense into AI, so that a robot not under continuous human control can make appropriate choices -- such as not harming innocent humans or causing unnecessary damage -- when faced with unexpected circumstances.

Artificial Intelligence is coming to sales on a significant scale. Rather than spending hours watching and researching companies, while looking for good opportunities to help out, salespeople can now rely on AI systems to do that grunt work for them. In almost every conversation I've had about AI in sales, that leads to the question of "does AI mean the end of salespeople". AI is great at sophisticated pattern recognition, and crunching through volumes of data. However, AI does not build trust, develop relationships, have conversations, change minds, or share a vision.

As data science gets set to drive the artifical intelligence (AI) market in 2017, a few Indian startups are initiating development of conversational bots, speech recognition tools, intelligent digital assistants and conversational services to be built over social media channels, a joint study by PwC-Assocham said on Thursday. Organisations are looking to leverage AI capabilities for predictive modelling. "Online shopping portals have extensively been using predictive capabilities to gauge consumer interest in products by building a targeted understanding of preferences through collection of browsing and click-stream data, and effectively targeting and engaging customers using a multichannel approach," the report added. To enable consumers to find better products at low prices, machine learning algorithms are being deployed for better matching of supply with consumer demand. Some of the areas where AI can improve legal processes, said the findings, include improved discovery and analysis based on law case history and formulation of legal arguments based on identification of relevant evidence.