Thank you for subscribing to the monthly THINK Marketing newsletter. Today's most advanced cognitive technology users offer a glimpse into the possibilities and tangible benefits of creating intelligent businesses. While scientists and engineers have been exploring cognitive and AI technologies in labs for decades, the big data explosion and recent advances in computing power have propelled them into mainstream applications. We wanted to find out exactly how businesses are applying these technologies across their organizations, and what tangible benefits they're beginning to realize. We surveyed 600 early adopters of cognitive technologies and wanted to share our learnings through an interactive visual.

Have you ever wanted to bottle-up and save that feeling when you have had a great vacation? Now, that joyful excitement of travel can be bottled in'Holiday Spirit' -- a new rum that's crafted using artificial intelligence. According to Joe Harrod -- a big data analyst and Artificial Intelligence expert -- Virgin Holidays used IBM Watson's linguistic AI to interpret millions of social media posts to pick out key emotions associated with holidays. IBM Watson then analyzed thousands of rum reviews to uncover which ingredients elicit different emotions and sensations in reviewers. The second data set analyzed the language and tone of 5,000 rum reviews and tasting notes found online.

As technology keeps improving, product, market and jobs innovations appear. Marketing can now analyse customer behaviour, predict churn and address tens of thousands of people with the right topic through email automation – welcome to marketing 4.0. Artificial intelligence is said to be one of the most important marketing trends of 2017. So what does it actually bring to marketing? There's still work to do to make chatbots completely efficient but they sure are going to grow bigger.

The 2017 Voice Report is a look ahead at what to expect in the coming chat wars between companies like Microsoft, Samsung, Google, and Amazon. It's also a survey of Google Assistant and Alexa users, and a look into why some startups make more successful Alexa skills than others. The report was put together by VoiceLabs, a voice analytics startup tapped by Google for the launch of its Actions on Google, a platform for the creation of Google Assistant actions. VoiceLabs works with developers making Google Assistant actions and Alexa skills. The company was created last year by Alexandre Linares and Adam Marchick shortly after Marchick stepped down as CEO of mobile marketing company Kahuna, which he cofounded in 2012.

Robert O. Work, the veteran defense official retained as deputy secretary by President Trump, calls them his "A.I. dudes." The breezy moniker belies their serious task: The dudes have been a kitchen cabinet of sorts, and have advised Mr. Work as he has sought to reshape warfare by bringing artificial intelligence to the battlefield. Last spring, he asked, "O.K., you guys are the smartest guys in A.I., right?" No, the dudes told him, "the smartest guys are at Facebook and Google," Mr. Work recalled in an interview. The United States no longer has a strategic monopoly on the technology, which is widely seen as the key factor in the next generation of warfare.

This seems to be the very first book on this ML framework (H2O). And is is just great. The book is crystal clear and extremely comprehensive, very easy to read, with examples you can reproduce easily (datasets are on line in a public Git repo). It covers a very practical ground on the 4 main algorithms implemented in H2O cluster: RandomForest, GBM, GLM, and last but not least: deep learning... "Practical" means explanations are strongly grounded on a set of 4 datasets, the author plays with, explaining both their preparation, analysis with H2O (code is both in R and PYTHON), and a great deal of time is spent on very useful considerations on how to'tune' the various algorithms to obtain better models, comparing their effectiveness. A must have for everyone interested in implementing ML features concretely.

The days of a depending on a human doctor may soon be numbered, as the future of the health industry looks increasingly like an AI-assisted scenario. Researchers and startups are developing artificially intelligent systems that are capable of diagnosing disease using a patient's breath and even from the emotional inflection of their voice. Someday, your smartphone may help you and your doctor determine whether a strange-looking lesion on your skin is cancerous or not, thanks to a team of Stanford University scientists that have developed a deep learning algorithm tailored just for the task. Led by Sebastian Thrun, an adjunct professor at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the team found that their diagnostic tool, which builds upon the same classification technique used by Google to differentiate between images of cats and dogs, performed as well or better than 21 board-certified dermatologists. Their findings were detailed in a recent paper published in Nature.

Anticipatory Design is possibly the next big leap within the field of Experience Design. "Design that is one step ahead" as Shapiro refers to it. This sounds amazing, but where does it lead us? And how will it affect our relationship with technology? I've dedicated my Master thesis to this topic to identify both ethical as design challenges that come with the development of predictive UX and application of Anticipatory Design as design pattern.

Industries around the world have caught AI fever. Developers around the world have made more ways than ever for the technology to automate, optimize and enable different services. Facebook, Alphabet, IBM, Microsoft, Amazon and other major companies are all working on AI projects, along with numerous tech startups. One such upstart, which leverages artificial intelligence and image recognition in part to enable commerce, is Clarifai. Founded in 2013, Clarifai utilizes neural networks and provides customers with an image and video recognition API.

Every Artificial Intelligence researcher has probably a vision of how intelligent machines will reshape the world. My idealistic view is one in which automation maximizes people's freedom by giving us more time to concentrate on the things we enjoy the most. Research in all areas is astonishing: we live better and longer, and our planet has started to heal. Robots lead to superlative boosts in productivity, and an unprecedented abundance reduces tensions amongst people. We have more time to learn and inform us, and machines enable us to manage much more knowledge, so we take better decisions.