Amazon has long been at the forefront of innovation, with Amazon Prime Air, Amazon Echo and now Amazon Go all recent inventions. But where Amazon really leads the way is in its marketing and specifically how it manages to describe and sell complex technology like artificial intelligence (AI) to the public. General knowledge about AI is still low, with only 18% of consumers surveyed by Weber Shandwick feeling like they had a lot of knowledge about AI. This figure rose to 48% for those who felt that they had a little, but it's still a paltry figure given how much of our lives AI has now infiltrated. We've now got Siri and Cortana in our pockets and on our computers, Google Home and Amazon Echo is in our living rooms, and soon our roads will be filled with AI operating self-driving cars and Amazon Go-esque stores in our high streets.

Kevin Gavin (CMO at Five9): Next year the use of Artificial Intelligence will continue to rise and we'll see an increase in its potential to make our everyday lives easier. Machines will continue to learn patterns and provide answers to help eliminate some of our mundane tasks, and intelligent machine personas like the Alexa in Amazon Echo and Siri in Apple devices, are paving the way for natural language processing (NLP). However, in the customer service industry in particular, at the end of the day customers will still seek the human touch when getting complex issues and questions resolved because AI will never be able to replace the empathy that a real person can provide. Daniel Incandela (SVP Global Marketing at ReturnPath): The future of all enterprise processes will be driven by Artificial Intelligence, which requires the highest quality of data to be successful. AI is where all business processes are headed; however, with the recent push of AI technology advancements for businesses - many companies have not addressed how they will ensure that the data their AI models are built on is high quality.

Security data science is booming--reports indicate that the security analytics market is set to reach $8 billion dollars by 2023, with a growth rate of 26%, thanks to relentless cyber attacks. If you want to stay ahead of emerging security threats in 2017, it is important to invest in the right areas. In March 2016, I wrote a piece on the 4 trends to be aware of for 2016; for my 2017 trends post, Cody Rioux from Netflix joins me, bringing his platform perspective. Our goal is to help you formulate a plan for every quarter of 2017 (i.e., 4 trends for 4 quarters). For each of our trends, we provide a short rationale, why we think the time is right for investing, and how to capitalize on the investment, with pointers to specific tools and resources.

Tay, the Microsoft chatbot that pranksters trained to spew racist comments, has joined the likes of the Apple Watch and the fire-prone Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone on MIT Technology Review's list of 2016's biggest technology failures. Tay had its day back in March, when it was touted as a millennial-minded AI agent that could learn more about the world through its conversations with users. It learned about human nature all too well: Mischief-makers fed its artificial mind with cuss words, racism, Nazi sentiments and conspiracy theories. Within 24 hours, Microsoft had to pull Tay offline. Other technological missteps were rated as fails because they didn't take off as expected, as was the case for Apple's smartwatch; or because they took off in flames, like the batteries in the Samsung phone.

The past few months were full of exciting announcements around two key topics: artificial intelligence and mobile messaging. Both have made significant leaps in progress, and together will make a very exciting year ahead for businesses. This year, Google announced Click-to-Message; Amazon released the Lex bot building toolkit; and mobile messaging platforms like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp surpassed 1 billion monthly active users. To keep up with the massive growth of these messaging channels companies are scrambling to develop both an AI strategy and a messaging strategy. However, 2017 will show that both strategies are extremely intertwined.

The speed of a system like ScenGen is powerful, but it's also an incredibly sturdy shield. AI systems can take cyber security to the next level by processing every possible threat and fortifying your system in advance. Using your teams, you can operate the same way in a more general sense by, instead of searching outward for marketing possibilities and risks, searching inward for weaknesses and potential problem areas. By making sure that structural integrity is sound, business owners can fortify structures to withstand anything, giving peace of mind both to brands and their customers.

Artificial intelligence is changing and improving the ways we manage our money. Research suggests Australians are ready to embrace fintech banking solutions, and the launch of three new London-based chatbot startups may be a sign the rest of the world is gearing up for a revolution too. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been rapidly progressing over the past two decades, with machines reaching and exceeding human performance on an increasing number of tasks. Just this week, the White House released a report entitled Preparing for the future of Artificial Intelligence, which describes the ways in which AI has and continues to yield new opportunities for progress in critical areas such as health, education, energy, and the environment. Another important area of business, ripe for disruption, is finance and banking.

Intelligent software could "eat" into diagnostic radiology, just as it has eaten countless other industries. We think the result, deep learning based diagnostics software, will likely lead to faster, cheaper, and more accurate diagnoses on a global scale. The key enabling technology is deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence (AI) that has established benchmarks in a broad range of applications.[1] ARK estimates that the total global addressable market for computer aided diagnostics (CADx) software could be $16B, as shown below. From a $1B base today, we think medical software companies and imaging device manufacturers have a strong and long revenue runway ahead, ready to revolutionize radiology.

In the software development industry, 2016 was truly transformative. The way software is developed, what it is being created for, and where it resides and is used all changed to a large degree last year. More development teams adopted agile and DevOps techniques, while QA "moved left" and integrated into the process, rather than being a post-development effort. The definition of the application life cycle changed (or expanded, depending on your point of view) to include deployment. Development shifted from doing nightly builds to Continuous Integration. Software release went from a major one-time event to Continuous Delivery.