The burdens on today's CMOs are increasing: they're taking on larger roles and budgets -- while needing insight into an increasingly complex customer journey. Now we must simultaneously understand our customers, keep up with their every move across channels in an increasingly complex customer journey, and take on bigger budgets while adapting to a bigger seat at the executive table, as sales and service will soon roll up into our department. In many respects this has thrust marketers into becoming not only data-literate but also data-fluent practitioners. This means we must be capable of defining the KPIs. We need to ensure that all marketing metrics, be they social, brand health, or email, align with and support our overarching business goals.

Last time around, in ZeniMax's suit against Facebook-owned Oculus, the virtual realty giant was found to owe the plaintiff $500 million because founder Palmer Luckey was judged to have violated a non-disclosure agreement. That was the bad news, but ZeniMax's other allegations were dismissed. Still, a half-billion bucks is a lot. Today, according to TechCrunch, Oculus dodged a bullet when a second breach-of-contract suit, this time filed by Total Recall Technologies, was dismissed by the court. TRT had filed suit in 2015, alleging that Luckey had violated an NDA he'd signed when he visited the company during development of the Oculus Rift.

Artificial intelligence is making our lives easier, but won't be a threat to human existence, according to panel of practitioners in the space. "One of the biggest misconceptions today about autonomous robots is how capable they are," said Brenna Argall, faculty research scientist at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, during a recent Chicago Innovation Awards event. "We see a lot of videos online showing robots doing amazing things. What isn't shown is the hours of footage where they did the wrong thing," she said. "The reality is that robots spend most of their time not doing what they're supposed to be doing."

Artificial intelligence could enhance the decision-making capacities of human beings and make us much better than we are. Or, it could destroy the human race entirely. We could soon find out. In an engrossing lecture Friday morning, political scientist and software developer Clifton van der Linden said the world may be on the brink of a super machine intelligence that has the full range of human intelligence, as well as autonomous decision-making. And that emerging reality has many of the great human minds worried about our future.

One of the theoretical advantages of software, artificial intelligence, algorithms, and robots is that they don't suffer many human foibles. They don't get sick or tired. They are polite -- or rude -- to everyone in equal measure. The reality, of course, is different. Technology is designed by humans in all their frailty. As a result, it is eminently capable of perfect human behavior.

Last year, FORBES MIDDLE EAST launched its first ever list of promising U.A.E. We have expanded it from 25 to 50, with an additional 50 to watch. Despite a tougher economic environment, venture capitalists are not holding back.

AI services like Apple's Siri and others operate by sending your queries to faraway data centers, which send back responses. The reason they rely on cloud-based computing is that today's electronics don't come with enough computing power to run the processing-heavy algorithms needed for machine learning. The typical CPUs most smartphones use could never handle a system like Siri on the device. But Dr. Chris Eliasmith, a theoretical neuroscientist and co-CEO of Canadian AI startup Applied Brain Research, is confident that a new type of chip is about to change that. "Many have suggested Moore's law is ending and that means we won't get'more compute' cheaper using the same methods," Eliasmith says.

Here are five things in technology that happened this past week and how they affect your business. The chatbot that made a splash last summer by overturning 160,000 parking tickets is back again, but now it is helping provide free legal aid to refugees. Through a simple-to-use chat interface on Facebook Messenger, "DoNotPay" can "help refugees fill in an immigration application in the US and Canada." First, this is a pretty good service to use in your business if you employ immigrants that need inexpensive help with immigration paperwork. Secondly, here's another example of artificial intelligence technology that's automating process and creating new opportunities – which may have an impact on your future business.

Many of these people are being exploited in ways that have existed throughout history: About 22% are victims of "forced sexual exploitation," with others made to work in agriculture, manufacturing, construction, or domestic labor, according to the report from the U.N.'s International Labor Organization. Researchers and activists say part of the solution to this ancient problem may be surprisingly modern: Machine learning and similar statistical tools can identify suppliers of goods and services that are more likely to involve forced labor, whether they're electronics manufacturers in developing countries or escort services in the United States. In the U.S., where sex work is frequently advertised online, leaving a digital trail, these techniques can also help guide law enforcement to sex trafficking gangs and their victims. In international trade, that kind of information can help buyers work with their vendors to ensure ethical practices throughout the supply chain or, failing that, switch to new vendors to stay in compliance with regulatory requirements and their own customers' ethics. "A lot of companies are becoming a lot more purpose-driven, and I think there's a lot more importance even to end consumers today about the type of companies they're buying [from]," says Alex Atzberger, president of SAP Ariba, a massive business-to-business procurement network.

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has said the impact of fake news is increasingly concerning and unveiled plans to tackle "unethical" political advertising and the harvesting of data. The British computer scientist said, exactly 28 years after his invention, three new trends have become alarming in the last year. In an open letter, the 61-year-old said misuse of data has created a "chilling effect on free speech" and warned of "internet blind spots" that are corrupting democracy. One problem, he wrote, is that most people find their news and information through a "handful" of social media sites and search engines, which are paid whenever someone clicks a link. "The net result is that these sites show us content they think we'll click on -- meaning that misinformation, or fake news, which is surprising, shocking, or designed to appeal to our biases, can spread like wildfire," he said.