Eye tracking technology, smart tv and advertising are about to meet. The two cameras were so small and so perfectly designed into the structure of the smart tv that resulted almost invisible to the user. Jeremy was ready to watch the match, a bottle of iced beer in his hand, and the tv was already watching him. He gazed at the advertising of a beer and almost lost his attention when a car advertising popped up into the screen. All information was silently recorded and stored, because he allowed the broadcaster to do so.

The latest in the drumbeat of news about artificial intelligence advances came from Seoul, where machine learning algorithms recently beat the world champion in a game of "Go." A Scientific American article explains why this is so impressive, but the implications run far deeper than a match of wits between man and machine. Soon, our workplaces will be transformed by artificial intelligence, with a wide range of processes and roles becoming redefined as some of the tasks comprising them are taken over by machines. Travelers are seeing early signs of this phenomenon. For example, in many US airports these days, instead of standing in a long line to have an immigration officer eyeball us, we scan our passport at a self-service kiosk, answer a few questions, get photographed, and then hand our photo receipt and passport to an agent who quickly verifies that everything checks out.

Developments in technology over the past few years have revolutionised the way consumers operate, and this is starting to have some pretty interesting effects on the legal industry. A particularly exciting technological development is the emergence of online access to free legal help. One free help site which holds immense potential to transform the legal industry is the site created by a 19 year-old student called Joshua Browder. The site helps to advise claimants on a range of low-level legal issues such as reclaiming Payment Protection Insurance (PPI), seeking compensation for flight delays and fighting parking tickets. This differs from other online legal advice sites such as AskALawyer and Lawyers Online because instead of relying on real life legal professionals to provide advice to site users, Browder's site uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to advise potential claimants.

Artificial intelligence company X.ai has raised 23 million in new funding that'll be used to support development of its personal assistant technology. The round was led by Two Sigma Ventures and will be allocated to hiring more data scientists, improving customer acquisition, and marketing to enterprise customers. Other investors in the company's latest round include DCM Ventures, Work-Bench Ventures, and existing investors like IA Ventures, FirstMark Capital, Softbank Capital, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, CrunchFund, and Pritzker Group Venture Capital. X.ai was founded in 2014 by former Visual Revenue CEO Dennis Mortensen, along with Alex Poon, Matt Casey, and Marcos Jimenez. Its first product is based on using artificial intelligence to book your meetings for you.

Search engines on large e-commerce sites often spit up a lot of results, which is great if you want to browse, but otherwise annoying. Twiggle thinks it has the solution. Internet conglomerate Naspers agrees, because it has led the Tel Aviv-based startup's 12.5 million Series A. Yahoo Japan, State of Mind Ventures (a returning investor), and Sir Ronald Cohen also participated in the round. Twiggle, which has raised 14.7 million so far, will launch on several e-commerce sites in August. It hasn't revealed who its clients are yet, but they will include other Naspers portfolio companies.

The IBM Watson AI system drew the world's attention by winning at "Jeopardy" in February 2011 against two of the game's all-time champions, and IBM has strived to apply the Watson system to more interesting problems than a trivia quiz ever since. IBM has also extended Watson's capabilities to developers, data scientists, and even ordinary business users. Along with IBM's SPSS predictive analytics software, Watson forms the foundation of IBM's cloud offerings in machine learning and advanced analytics. IBM breaks the Watson system into five parts: machine learning, question analysis, natural language processing, feature engineering, and ontology analysis. From these parts, IBM has built out a suite of composable cloud services from which you can make your own mini-Watson for a solution to your problem.

Whether it's retail, banking, marketing analytics, or even mobile telecommunications carriers, companies are trying to predict what customers will buy next. In some cases, this is to help retain existing customers via offers on their regular purchases. In others, this is to target customers with complimentary purchases. While predicting the future is hard, if it can be done to a statistically significant level, there are a plethora of opportunities for those able to anticipate customer behavior. Now with real-time analytics, the advent of big data technologies and machine learning techniques, predicting purchases is more possible than ever.

"The new trend is to describe a traditional business and then add the words'AI.' A few years back, it was'social'." But in certain sectors, adding AI into the mix indeed means revolutionizing it. Perhaps no more is this change happening than in the banking sector. The recent PAPIs Connect brought together the academics and business people alike to talk about how predictive APIs are making artificial intelligence, machine learning and even deep learning more accessible.

Kik's is a bit different from its peers, and the differences reveal some fascinating nuances about how messaging is evolving into a new user-interface paradigm to rival apps. For people who want to create a bot, Kik offers a simple API that allows them to specify how the bot will behave: What it can do, what it will say, and what responses you can type in reply. For users, the bots can be summoned into any conversation with an "@" mention. So you might be making plans with a friend depending on the weather, and bring forth @weatherchannel to give you an update on the forecast. Then, the bot simply leaves your conversation--a telling, human-centered detail meant to teach users that bots are here to help rather than to listen passively to their conversations.

Hawking and Musk have both expressed concerns about advances in AI in the past. Hawking has warned in the past that AI "could spell the end of the human race." Meanwhile, Elon Musk called AI our "biggest existential threat" and likened it to "summoning the demon."