Toyota U.S. Senior Vice President Bob Carter shows off the company's Concept-i prototype at CES 2017 in Las Vegas. As auto and tech companies race to perfect automated driving, Toyota is equally fixated on how the relationship between driver and vehicle will evolve as advances in artificial intelligence give rise to motorized robots with personalities. An initial version of the automotive giant's vision for the next generation of mobility is the Concept-i, a small hatchback packed to the rafters with advanced technology and most importantly an onboard virtual assistant dubbed Yui designed to curate the experience for occupants. Given the rapid pace of high-tech changes coming to the auto market, it's essential to keep the connection between car and driver in mind when planning new products, Bob Carter, senior vice president of Toyota's U.S unit, said at a press conference at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on Wednesday. "It's really easy to lose sight of why we build cars: We make them for people," Carter said.

Alphabet's (NASDAQ: GOOG, GOOGL) search company Google continued to dominate the online search ads market in 2016. The company also made headway in its moon shot businesses, which span life sciences, self-driving cars, IoT and Internet Fiber businesses. Nevertheless, the investment outlay in these businesses continued to impact the profitability. In this note, we explore Alphabet's performance during the year. Trefis currently estimates that PC search ads, mobile search ads and YouTube ads contribute over 60% to the firm's value.

In 2016, I wrote about the transformation happening in human resources and I called it the "Consumerization of HR," referring to how companies create a social, mobile, and consumer-style experience for employees. Now, as we enter 2017, the next journey for HR leaders will be to apply a consumer and a digital lens to the HR function creating an employee experience that mirrors their best customer experience. Today, almost every company is undergoing a digital transformation. Cloud and mobile computing, artificial intelligence, and increasing automation have created the potential to transform nearly every aspect of a business. A survey of CEOs conducted by Fortune asked whether they thought their company was a "technology company" and 67% of CEOs said YES! The same can be said for forward looking HR departments like those at IBM and General Electric.

But how do we evolve the chat experience? Our current choices for mobile chat apps leave a range of expression untapped. In the rush to create chat bots to "personalize" the experiences we have with brands, we somehow forgot to give users the ability to personalize 1:1 and group chat. Most chat apps are still operating in a Helvetica (or San Francisco - nod to iOS) universe. We've been given very few tools within these apps to express ourselves.

A Japanese insurance company has decided to get rid of 34 jobs and instead get artificial intelligence to take over assessing medical insurance claims over the phone. Starting from January 2017, Tokyo-based Fukoku Life Insurance Mutual Company is handing over the roles of 34 human insurance agents to IBM Watson Explorer, which is a cognitive search and content analysis platform that uses machine learning and language processing to analyse data for trends and patterns. According to a press release, Fukoku Life is using IBM Watson Explorer to classify and categorise diseases, injuries and surgical procedures. When insurance policy holders call the company's hotline to make an insurance claim, the IBM Watson supercomputer is able to analyse the customer's voice and detect keywords. As part of making the claim, the policyholder has to submit a medical certificate showing what condition they have, and IBM Watson can detect the name of the injury or disease listed, as well as dates such as the hospital admission date and surgery date.

Health care doesn't have a big data problem. It has a big data opportunity, thanks to artificial intelligence. Think about the number of inefficiencies in your daily life -- long lines, traffic jams, a reliance on "snail mail" for certain bills or communications. Those inefficiencies are inconvenient and annoying, yes, but they are usually not a matter of life and death. The need for productivity in health care is different.

And this may just be the next evolution of the operating system. Cognitive computing services might include everything from predictive maintenance to customer experience and medical diagnoses. According to a recent report from Allied Market Research, the cognitive computing market is expected to generate revenue of $13.7 billion by 2020. On top of that, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty recently told CNBC that Watson would reach more than 1 billion consumers by the end of 2017. The cognitive computing market is growing in size and complexity--and quickly.

KHARAGPUR: Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Thursday said his organisation is "betting big" on advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in the coming years. Asked on the next big thing at Google, Pichai said: "I can't quite tell exactly but advances in AI and machine learning, we are making a big bet on that. Advances in machine learning will bring a difference in many many fields." He was interacting with students at his alma mater IIT - Kharagpur. Pichai earned his degree in Metallurgical Engineering from IIT-Kharagpur.

Three big themes at CES in Las Vegas for enterprises to watch look to be big data, connected devices or the Internet of Things, and artificial intelligence (AI), and sometimes the combination of all three. CES is one of the largest and most popular technology trade shows offering the latest gadgets for both consumers and IT business professionals and the 2017 edition opens to the public Jan. 5. This year, enterprise IT department specialists can expect to see the continued reign of data collection, connected devices and artificial intelligence (AI) – and combinations of all three. IBM Corp., for example, has placed a special focus on encouraging companies to become what it calls a "cognitive business" through using its Watson AI system to understand, reason, learn and make sense of collected data. IBM says this will allow companies to "improve business outcomes and increase revenue."

Not a day goes by when we don't hear of something related to artificial intelligence in the news. But AI (sometimes confused with machine learning, which is simply a technique within AI) wouldn't be where it is today if it weren't for one seminal event in 2016: AlphaGo beating Lee Sedol. In March last year, an AI program that trained itself to play the ancient game of Go beat the 18-time world champion. The reason it was such a feat for AI, was because Go is about feel, strategic judgment and winning multiple battles across the board – and a computer cannot simply memorise all possible combinations of board pieces, assess the situation, construct and execute a strategy to win, like chess. So the programmers of AlphaGo, from Google DeepMind, set up the basic heuristics of the game, allowed AlphaGo to analyse previous games and then split its brain so it could play itself millions of times.