A comprehensive report on AI and how it can be used in marketing. Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly establishing itself as a field of great potential value to business and marketers. This 34-page report spells out how marketers can benefit from developments in AI, while helping you to develop your point of view on this fascinating subject. Report author Martin Talks, an expert in digital transformation and emerging technology, demystifies what is actually meant by artificial intelligence, and how organisations across different sectors can start to approach different use cases. Fill in your details below to receive your complimentary copy.

These capabilities today help drive disruption in all kinds of businesses, and are keys to a promising future. These technologies all help businesses to drive more decision-making processes and analysis within software. In turn, this helps to make the business more agile and scalable – and can also eliminate built-in human bias and guesswork. Perhaps most important, these technologies often include the ability to learn and improve as more decisions are made, so they can improve over time. But what happens when the inevitable disputes occur and regulators intervene or lawsuits are filed?

Facebook launched a concierge service called M through its Messenger app in 2015. M can purchase items, get gifts delivered, book restaurants, and make travel arrangements for the user. There is an element of the Mechanical Turk about it at the moment as it is powered by a combination of AI and real-life people. Siri has been around for a few years but has been upgraded in that time. It's now capable of showing the user specific photos he or she has taken, ordering things via ecommerce apps and giving directions.

It was a thing in the '90s. You put on this giant space helmet and it allowed you to enter a world of brightly-coloured polygons -- it was a bit like being Max Headroom. It rightly fizzled, but now it's back with a vengeance. There were no fewer than 40 different Virtual Reality seminars over the course of this year's SXSW Interactive festival, which saw tech leaders revisiting some ideas of yesteryear, having another crack, and succeeding handsomely. It seems that everything old is new again.

Microsoft wants you to talk more with your computer--and have more useful conversations. The giant software company is promoting new uses for Cortana--its voice-activated answer to Apple's Siri digital assistant--including the ability to interact with software "bots" that can have limited conversations with users and help with tasks like booking a hotel room, ordering a meal or arranging a delivery. Voice-activated services like Siri, "OK Google," or Amazon's Alexa can already perform tasks for users like playing a song at a request or answering a question. Bots are smarter than traditional software apps, though, using artificial intelligence to respond to a wider range of commands and in a convenient, conversational way. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, at the opening Wednesday of the company's annual conference for software developers, touted the power of "conversational intelligence" as he outlined a long-term vision in which Cortana, a central feature of Windows 10, becomes a digital concierge for other online interactions.

The crash of oil prices and slowdown of China's economy have fetched headlines in media off late. The subject has encouraged me to understand economic reasons and relate the implications for Indian services industries. It would be good to preempt a discussion on the topic whether what could happen to Chinese manufacturing or to Middle-East Oil industry could repeat for Indian IT? If so, what should India do to prepare itself today to face this future? You are in the final lap of your early morning dream and the alarm goes off at 6AM.

CAMBRIDGE – How can we improve the state of the world? How can we make countries more competitive, growth more sustainable and inclusive, and genders more equal? One way is to have a correct theory of the relationship between actions and outcomes and then to implement actions that achieve our goals. But, in most of the situations we face, we lack such a theory, or if we have one, we are not sure that it is correct. Should we postpone action until we learn about what works? But how will we learn if we do not act?

In October 2015, Google released a piece of machine learning software called TensorFlow. TensorFlow is open source software for creating machine learning models, especially deep neural networks. It is the second-generation software for machine learning infrastructure built at Google, and it powers many of their products such as Google Inbox, Google Translator, Youtube, Google Ads, and more. Already, TensorFlow is the most "popular" machine learning software: on github it has 19,000 likes and 6,500 forks. Google is also relentlessly releasing updates, supporting products, and training courses.

I recently flew from Boston to Miami. The journey, thankfully, was uneventful but there's no doubt I was more at risk in the taxi rides to and from the airports than when 36,000 feet up. The autopilot and advanced airline technology offered me the assurance of safety, whereas on the ground I was exposed to the vagaries of drivers and others on the road. This is just one example of how we all benefit from the power of computers. But what we are accustomed to today will be very different in the future.

SAN FRANCISCO – Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella kicked off the company's Build developers conference with a vision of the future filled with chatbots, machine learning and artificial intelligence. "Bots are the new apps," said Nadella during a nearly three-hour keynote here that sketched a vision for the way humans will interact with machines. That's the world you're going to get to see in the years to come." Onstage demos hammered home those ideas. One involved a smartphone conversing with digital assistant Cortana about planning a trip to Ireland, which soon found Cortana bringing in a Westin Hotels chatbot that booked a room based on the contents of the chat.