It's clear artificial intelligence (AI) and automation will dramatically affect the job market, but there's conflicting ideas on just how soon this will happen. Some believe it's imminent -- possibly fueled by developments like the Japanese insurance company replacing over 30 employees with robots -- but it's not that cut and dried. Many of the jobs that will be automated are the same jobs companies have been outsourcing for years: customer support, data entry, accounting, etc. Others are jobs they simply cannot fill due to decreases in headcount. Either way, as transactions and expectations for real-time output increase, businesses are struggling to meet this demand and must digitize their operations to remain competitive.

SoftBank's robot, 'Pepper', performs during a news conference in Taipei Thomson Reuters Drew Breunig works with data, technology, advertising and more. He works on business applications at @PlaceIQ and is Co-founder at @GetReporter. Follow him on Twitter at @dbreunig. As buzzwords become ubiquitous they become easier to tune out. We've finely honed this defense mechanism, for good purpose. It's better to focus on what's in front of us than the flavor of the week.

If you want your apps to understand what someone's saying or know if your user-content rules are being broken, Microsoft has you covered. Microsoft is expanding its portfolio of Cognitive Services--in-the-cloud APIs that provide out-of-the-box versions of useful algorithms--to include two new services that go into general availability next month: the Content Moderator and Bing Speech APIs. Bing Speech converts audio into text and vice versa. It's also able to apply contextual understanding to that speech or text. The Speech API's demo page lets you try a limited sample of both text-to-speech and speech-to-text for yourself.

Women in Technology, a friend of TandemNSI, is hosting its monthly event on Feb. 16 on Artificial Intelligence in McLean, VA, with speakers from MITRE, IBM, Local Motors and Northrop Grumman. AI has long fascinated us as a society, becoming central to the plots of numerous thriller movies and novels. Now AI is no longer just fiction; it is a reality, and its applications are broad reaching. AI-based technology is already allowing us to make invaluable advancements in medicine, cybersecurity, transportation, finance, and education. The potential benefits are so great, they are driving billions of dollars of investment.

Toyota is partnering with Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to research artificial intelligence and robotics in order to bring greater autonomy to Toyota cars. The car maker will contribute US$50 million over five years to two research centers that are being set up at Stanford and MIT. However, don't expect a computer to completely drive your Camry any time soon. Toyota will always assume a person will be at the wheel, said Gill Pratt, who oversaw the DARPA Robotics Challenge and is now joining Toyota as an executive technical adviser. Toyota will focus on creating "human-centric systems" that are supplemented by technology, Pratt said Friday at a press conference in Palo Alto, California.

AI that learns, evolves and can transform itself is closer than you think. Would you have a relationship with an AI that could take the form of your ideal partner?

Algorithms are embedded into our technological lives, helping accomplish a variety of tasks like making sure that email makes it to your aunt or that you're matched to someone on a dating website who likes the same bands as you. Sure, such computer code aims to make our lives easier, but experts cited in a new report by Pew Research Center and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center are worried that algorithms may also make us lose our ability to make decisions. After all, if the software can do it for us, why should we bother? "Algorithms are the new arbiters of human decision-making in almost any area we can imagine, from watching a movie (Affectiva emotion recognition) to buying a house (Zillow.com) to self-driving cars (Google)," Barry Chudakov, founder and principal at Sertain Research and StreamFuzion Corp., says in the report. But despite advances, algorithms may lead to a loss in human judgment as people become reliant on the software to think for them.

Sophos (LSE: SOPH), a global leader in network and endpoint security, today announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Invincea, a visionary provider of next-generation malware protection. Invincea's endpoint security portfolio is designed to detect and prevent unknown malware and sophisticated attacks via its patented deep learning neural-network algorithms. It has been consistently ranked as among the best performing machine learning, signature-less next-generation endpoint technologies in third-party testing and rated highly both for high detection and low false-positive rates. Headquartered in Fairfax, Va., Invincea was founded by chief executive officer Anup Ghosh to address the rapidly growing zero-day security threat from nation states, cyber criminals and rogue actors. Invincea's flagship product X by Invincea uses deep learning neural networks and behavioral monitoring to detect previously unseen malware and stops attacks before damage occurs.

Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research Group, a major new engineering and research division formed last year inside the Redmond company, is debuting a new technology that lets developers customize Microsoft's speech-to-text engine for use in their own apps and online services. The new Custom Speech Service is set for release today as a public preview. Microsoft says it lets developers upload a unique vocabulary -- such as alien names in Human Interact's VR game Starship Commander -- to produce a sophisticated language model for recognizing voice commands and other speech from users. It's the latest in a series of "cognitive services" from Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research Group, a 5,000-person division led by Microsoft Research chief Harry Shum. The company says it has expanded from four to 25 cognitive services in the last two years, including 19 in preview and six that are generally available.

On any given day, radiologists at UC San Francisco (UCSF) and across the country view thousands of x-rays. These radiologists, with many years of experience in the medical and research world, have become adept at identifying which images require immediate follow-up or intervention. They can determine, for example, whether the lungs of a trauma patient are collapsed or if there is internal bleeding that requires immediate intervention. But with all of the talk about making healthcare more efficient, the ability of clinicians to read the images and know what they're seeing isn't what's holding back further progress. The challenge is that radiologists only have two eyes and so many hours in a day.