One area of business that stands to benefit from machine learning is customer service. Technologies like natural language processing and sentiment analysis can help companies better understand how to respond to customer feedback and questions. At the 2017 Google Cloud Next conference in San Francisco, Apoorv Saxena, a product manager on the Google Cloud team, hosted a breakout session explaining how organizations can use Google products to improve their customer service. He began by outlining the two different approaches that companies can take to machine learning. The first approach, Saxena said, is to use pre-trained models in the form of APIs to handle the machine learning needs of the company.

If IBM is looking for a new application for its Watson machine learning tools, it might consider putting health care providers' procurement and systems integration woes ahead of curing cancer. The fall-out from that project has now prompted the resignation of the cancer center's president, Ronald DePinho, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. The university recently published an internal audit report into the procurement processes that led it to hand almost $40 million to IBM and over $21 million to PwC for work on the project, almost all of it without board approval. It noted that the scope of its review was limited to contracting and procurement practices and compliance issues, and did not cover project management and system development activities. The audit "should not be interpreted as an opinion on the scientific basis or functional capabilities of the system in its current state," because a separate review of those aspects of the project is being conducted by an external consultant, it said. The Oncology Expert Advisor was intended to take in medical literature, treatment options, research data and patient records, using IBM's Watson machine learning algorithms to provide clinical advice to help oncologists in the community to provide the same level of care as doctors at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

IBM has partnered marketing cloud specialist Salesforce to deliver a unified AI- powered solution, bringing together IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein. Both AI platforms will be deployed using a new integration practice formed by Bluewolf, an IBM company. As part of the partnership, IBM will deploy Salesforce Service Cloud across the company to transform its global product support services and gain a single, unified view of every IBM customer. Bluewolf's new Solution Accelerators for AI integration will develop new industry-specific functions used by enterprise clients to fast-track adoption of cognitive applications seamlessly. It's been a few weeks since IBM CEO Ginni Rometty attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

What's great about living and working in Austin, TX is the abundance of meet-ups and learning opportunities. My day job at Watson involves helping to market Watson Conversation. Sure I understand the terminology and have experience using our API, but I wanted to develop a deeper understanding of the chatbot scene here and learn the latest advancements. That's where Talkabot comes into play. Talkabot are meetups, conferences and community around bots and conversational software hosted by Howdy.

In 2011, IBM sent its supercomputer Watson onto the popular American TV quiz show Jeopardy where it succeeded in matching wits with and beating two of the TV show's most successful players. That was over five years ago, but if you ask members of the public to describe IBM Watson, those in the know will say that it's a huge great black mainframe computer that's incredibly smart. Yet according to IBM, that's where you'd be wrong – the computing giant is adamant that the future of artificial intelligence will not be one big scary digital brain, and technology is definitely not going to kill us off one day. "When IBM Watson first came out, we used to think about it as a giant brain in a jar, but it's not that," John Cohn, an IBM Fellow in the IBM Watson Internet of Things (IoT) division tells IBTimes UK while showing us around IBM's new global IoT headquarters in Munich, Germany. "It's a bunch of tools that you can use to compose systems that interact naturally with humans, learns from their situation, adapting and then applying that knowledge. It's not an easy philosophy to apply, but it can bring benefits to so many different industries."

IBM Watson burst onto the world stage in 2011 when it participated in the trivia-based game show Jeopardy!. The supercomputer beat out two former champions to claim a victory for "artificial intelligence". Since then, Watson has embarked on a number of challenges across a variety of domains, from identifying the best cancer treatments to improving weather forecasting. For its latest endeavor, Watson is looking to improve the quality of life for individuals with autism and other cognitive disorders. Autism refers to a group of complex disorders of brain development characterized by difficulties in social interaction, verbal and nonverbal communication and possible repetitive behaviors.

IBM's Watson may be most famous for winning at the game show "Jeopardy!" In a room at IBM offices, software developers and business customers can query the famous computer and see a demonstration of its work as a research partner in fields ranging from land use to medicine. The room itself has a display wall on one side and a touch screen in the center and near the window. In a recent demonstration of how the machine approaches search queries, Rachel Liddell, a "Watson Experience Leader," used the central touch screen to search through a series of TED talks. As she touched the screen to look up lectures on human psychology, Watson created a set of associated topics, such as "education," and touching one of those words generated more specific topics that appeared in the talk.

BARCELONA, Spain--IBM has come up with a way to show off the more artistic side of its artificial intelligence capabilities while honoring one of Spain's most famous architects. For this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, IBM tasked its Watson super computer with the understanding Antoni Gaudí's greatest works such as La Pedrera and la Sagrada Família to help create a unique sculpture for the annual trade show. Using its visual-recognition technology, Watson reviewed hundreds of images of Gaudí's buildings, along with additional examples of local architecture to understand trends in composition and inspirations. IBM then tapped Watson's AlchemyLanguage software to read documents about Gaudí and other architects, along with song lyrics and other documents about the city's history and culture. "What we were really trying to do at the essence was figure out if we can programmatically start to understand what the features of a particular style or architect are," said Jeff Arn, a Watson manager at IBM. Watson identified key elements of Gaudí's Catalan modernist style--known for its dream-like colors and shapes and odes to the natural world.

You hear about it every day, no matter what industry you work in. However, most of us have yet to truly interact with it, to experience the full potential it offers beyond AI assistants that order us pizza or recommend movies. We see its big-industry impacts in healthcare and Silicon Valley, but when will experts across all industries have a chance to get their hands on this technology? This is why when I got the opportunity as an architect to create a thinking sculpture for Mobile World Congress with IBM Watson, I couldn't say no. Architectural design has always been my passion, and I've always been intrigued by technology.

The adoption and application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to accelerate at an exponential rate in modern businesses. As referenced in the 2017 Tech Trend Report, AI is nearing completion of the next layer in technological advancement, integrated into everything individuals and organizations do. This trajectory is predicted to drive cumulative worldwide spending of $40.6 billion on AI projects by 2024 – according to Raconteur. This is expected to create mass opportunity for the pioneering businesses currently investing in AI development. Moving beyond the hype in existing media coverage, this post will uncover the reality behind what AI means for businesses today, in the near future, and beyond 2017.