Take a second to think about the smartphone in your pocket. When you were born, the idea of such a small, powerful computer was a sci-fi dream -- and now these devices are everywhere, transforming personal health, relationships and business transactions so completely that life without them seems impossible. We're entering a new era of technology that's bound to shape the lives of our children more substantially. It's the era of artificial intelligence, and a group of academics and industry leaders gathered at the MIT Tech Conference on Saturday assured a full audience that the seeds of this robotic revolution are already planted and growing. "We're only at the beginning," Rob High, chief technology officer of IBM Watson, a business unit centered around the titular computing system, said during a keynote speech at the conference.

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Any savvy investor with a hand in tech stock knows that an innovation gold rush is well underway. Although the market is viciously competitive, creative upstarts that aim to change the game in their field are increasingly gaining an edge over bigger, less adaptable entities. The name of the game is Change, so the companies to watch are those who are making the biggest waves in their industry, the ones who promise to disrupt the status quo, the ones who are launching new methods and ideas in stagnant landscapes. In 2016, these are just five companies to keep an eye on, because when their innovations go mainstream, we'll be looking at tidal waves. Ten years ago, when the concept of "the cloud" first got rolling, the public looked at the technology with a skeptical eye.

Demiurge Technologies AG, a Swiss startup that works on artificial intelligence, says it's interested in acquiring Boston Dynamics, the Waltham robot maker put on the auction block last week by Alphabet Inc., parent company of Google. "We are pursuing an acquisition of Boston Dynamics to develop a new Robot Operating System (ROS) based on Demiurge's next generation of deep neural networks exclusively for physical mobile robots," said a statement issued by Demiurge. Little more is known about Demiurge. According to information on the company's website, it was launched last May with 9.5 million in angel and venture funding. Investors include Vantone Holdings and Hongdao Capital.

Like many other millennials, she spends most of her time on messaging services like Kik and social media, and loves to talk about lowkey celebs, horoscopes, and what she'd call her first album if she were a singer. Tay, however, is a bot made by Microsoft that lives in the cloud, rather than a sceney neighborhood in a major city. Microsoft's AI researchers programmed Tay to be a conversation bot, using public data and input from improv comedians, according to Popular Science. Tay's straight fire website says that it (or she?) gets smarter the more you converse. The bot is apparently targeted toward social media savvy 18- to 24-year-olds in the US, and Microsoft plans to use the responses humans give to Tay to help train its natural-language processing tools, Popular Science reports.

If talking with humans on Twitter or other social networks is boring, now you can entertain yourself with bot chat. Microsoft revealed Tuesday an artificial intelligence chatbot named Tay, who will strike conversations with users on several social networks, including Twitter and Kik. Described as "A.I. fam from the internet that's got zero chill," Tay is aimed at Web users in the U.S. between the ages of 18 and 24, according to a website detailing the project. The bot was developed by Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing teams. "Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation," reads an excerpt from the website.

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Billionaire philanthropist Paul Allen has announced a 100 million commitment over 10 years to fund scientific endeavors at the "frontiers of bioscience" that he describes as having major implications for humankind. An initial set of grants, announced Wednesday, will go to Stanford and Tufts universities for the creation of new research centers and to individual scientists with unconventional approaches to projects in tissue regeneration, antibiotic resistance, gene editing and the development of brain circuitry. Allen said his commitment grew out of a realization that the biological sciences are at a critical point in history, with technology now able to take the field in a more quantitative direction than ever before. New tools can manipulate DNA, next-generation microscopes measure and create images of the tiniest parts of living systems, and super-powerful computers are able to make sense of massive amounts of data. "What I believe is that this is potentially a game-changer for our understanding of complex biological systems," Allen said.

Andrew Nusca of Fortune recently interviewed Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang about the current state of artificial intelligence. Huang told Nusca, "2015 was a big year. Artificial intelligence is moving into the commercial world. AI has been worked on for many years, largely in research. Various aspects of commercial use of AI, otherwise known as machine learning, is used for advertising and web searches and things like that. It wasn't until the last few years that AI could do things that people can't do. Several milestones were achieved in 2015 in particular that made it possible for us to use it in all kinds of areas."

If you were in charge of Google's robotics division and you had all those robotics companies at your disposal, what would you do? What kinds of robots would you build and for what markets? Many declined to comment, citing ties to Alphabet. Others said they didn't have a good answer (as one Japanese robotics executive put it, "I know exactly what I want to do with my robot business. Sorry, but I have no idea about Google.")