Google is expected to dive deeper into virtual reality and artificial intelligence Wednesday during an annual conference that serves as a launching pad for its latest products and innovations. Although Google keeps its plans under wraps until the big event, the conference agenda makes it clear that virtual reality and artificial intelligence, or "machine learning," will be among the focal points. That has spurred speculation that Google is getting ready to release a virtual-reality device to compete with Facebook's new Oculus Rift headset, as well as the Samsung's Gear VR and the Vive from HTC and Valve. "2016 is already the year of VR," writes CNET's Sarah Mitroff. "[Google] has shown off Cardboard, its low-cost portable VR viewer initiative, for the last two years, and this year we're certain to see new developments."

Artificial intelligence has been around since 1956 and has made some giant leaps in that time: beating the best human at chess, the best human at US gameshow Jeopardy and recently beating the best human at complex strategy game Go. Brands have only recently started adopting artificial intelligence for core consumer services. Google's voice recognition technology now claims 98% accuracy and Facebook's DeepFace is said to recognise faces with a 97% success rate. IBM's Watson, which uses artificial intelligence to perform its question-answering function, is 2,400% "smarter" today than when it achieved the Jeopardy victory five years ago. There is no doubt that the relationship between men and machines is changing, and brands are on the cusp of making artificial intelligence an everyday element of their customer offerings.

Last week, Google released Parsey McParseface, a funny name for a state-of-the-art tool aimed at one of the most difficult problems in artificial intelligence. For all that computers have accomplished in the past five years, from winning on "Jeopardy!" to defeating a Go grandmaster, they are still terrible at figuring out what people are saying. Language is one of the most complex tasks that humans perform. That's why there has been such a hullaballo over McParseface, which is pretty much a glorified sentence diagrammer. McParseface does what most students learn to do in elementary school.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is gaining momentum across industries with the help of companies such as IBM, Google, and Microsoft. McKinsey & Company estimates that as much as 45% of the tasks currently performed by people can be automated using current technologies – not only low-level rote tasks, but high-level knowledge work as well. "Our point of view is that there is no function, no industry, almost no role that won't potentially be affected by this set of technologies – not just every occupation, but every activity within each occupation," said Michael Chui, a partner with McKinsey Global Institute, in an interview. "It's not just automating the labor that's being done, but the work people do will have to change as well. Understanding how to take advantage of these technologies is going to be critically important."

"[It's a] data token that boils you down to a data object," says Pete Kazanjy, founder of TalentBin, a service that uses social media to find job recruits (now part of Monster). That's especially true for hard numbers, said Google's SVP of "people operations" Laszlo Bock in a 2013 New York Times interview. "One of the things we've seen from all our data crunching is that GPAs are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless," said Bock. A growing wave of hiring tech firms are ingesting far more information about candidates--surveys, work samples, social media posts, word choice, even facial expressions. Adding artificial intelligence (AI), they promise to assess work skills as well as personality traits like empathy, grit, and prejudice to provide a richer understanding of who the applicant is and whether they will fit.

A computer program can scan your sketches and search for a photograph that looks just like them. It's an exciting step towards a search engine based on drawings, says James Hays, a computer scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. "For some types of images you want to find, it would be very hard to express that thing with just language," he says. "What if you could just draw what you want?" In the past few years, artificial intelligence has become adept at recognising photos of cats or faces.

Romance novels aren't known for their fresh metaphors. The genre is meant to be palatable and easy to enjoy even if your critical thinking skills are disengaged. Not that there's anything decidedly unsexy about a knotty metaphor (Ha! Ha!) -- it's just that parsing out the symbolism of an hour-long thunderstorm won't get the job done as quickly as, say, comparing a woman's "deep gaze" to the "midnight sky." So if you're looking to spruce up your language use, adorning it with novel comparisons, romance novels might not be the best place to start. But Google, hoping to elevate the conversational skills of its Artificial Intelligence, thought otherwise.

How do you combine historical Big Data with machine learning for real-time analytics? An approach is outlined with different software vendors, business use cases, and best practices. "Big Data" has gained a lot of momentum recently. Vast amounts of operational data are collected and stored in Hadoop and other platforms on which historical analysis is conducted. Business intelligence tools and distributed statistical computing are used to find new patterns in this data and gain new insights and knowledge for a variety of use cases: promotions, up- and cross-sell campaigns, improved customer experience, or fraud detection.

Data centers are an ideal environment for machine learning since there is so much data available, said Christopher Yetman, COO at Vantage Data Centers, a data center services provider in Santa Clara, Calif. There is sensor data at the building and physical level, with servers and network devices generating vast amounts of information about their own operations. Humans have used that data in the past, but not to its fullest potential. There are also sensors that generate data about air pressure, humidity, temperature and supply voltage and typically feed into a programmable logic controller, Yetman said. The data can then trigger specific actions at certain thresholds, like when a room begins to get too warm.

On Google's recent Q3 earnings call, Google's CEO, Sundar Pichai said that one "transformative" technology is causing Google to rethink "how we're doing everything." There's a single technology that's causing Google to rethink they way it does everything. The same technology is in the process of transforming many of the biggest names in tech -- Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, UBER, Twitter -- not to mention smaller, up-and-coming startups. Entrepreneur and thought leader Peter Diamandis say that it will "do more to improve healthcare than all the biological sciences combined" and will generate large amounts of wealth and abundance. Billionaire venture capitalist Vinod Khosla agrees, saying that over the next 50 years, it will drive abundance, transform industries, and impact almost every part of society.