Artificial intelligence might conjure images of a robotic Haley Joel Osment in Spielberg's film AI, or it may make you think of Data from Star Trek. Yet the impact of artificial intelligence in everyday life is more understated and far-reaching than science fiction might suggest. Artificial intelligence has the potential to offer $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030. You already encounter it every day. Think of all those times Amazon recommended a book to you or Netflix suggested a film or TV show.

Even as AI assistants delve deeper into consumer hardware, companies still seem a bit reticent to bring them deep into their office software workflows. Jane.ai is aiming to bring natural language processing and intelligence into an employee-facing solution that lets people query a digital assistant to give them information about documents, meetings and general company knowledge. The St. Louis startup announced today that it is raising an $8.4 million Series A from private investors to power this vision. Jane lives inside apps like Slack and Skype for Business (in addition to its own web app) where users are already chatting with co-workers and may need to surface information quickly that they don't have ready access to. With Jane, employees can just message the assistant directly and the system will comb through information and apps that were uploaded and connected to the system in order to find answers.

The problem with all new hotel technology, unfortunately, is that innovation gets turned into buzzwords quickly, usually in order to sell more products and services. Even worse, all these buzzwords are thrown into the same marketing pot, creating a vast confusion that only "experts" can understand. With this article and accompanying infographic, we will demystify this subject of artificial intelligence (AI) and explain, in plain terms, what it is and what it means for hotels. This guide was created with the intention of clarifying the most important terms and concepts related to artificial intelligence and shedding some light on what AI really means for hotels, without technicalities and by providing easy-to-understand industry examples. Note: This article is also available as a PDF to download here. "What is a lobby boy? A lobby boy is completely invisible, yet always in sight. A lobby boy remembers what people hate. A lobby boy anticipates the client's needs before the needs are needed".

There are some frequent stereotypes you'll hear about Russian men, mainly that they're all a bunch of alcoholic football soccer fans who die early because of their love for vodka, leaving behind some of the most beautiful women on the planet who outlive them by ten years on average. While the stereotypes have some serious merit, Russia isn't just about hard drinking, chasing skirts, and hooliganism. All that vodka fuels some of the world's brightest minds, like Russia's fearless leader, Vladimir Putin, who believes that artificial intelligence will be the key to global supremacy. As China and the US are fighting for AI supremacy and the EU is scrambling to catch up, Russia's growing its footprint in AI with a seemingly low-key approach. Hearing less about Russian AI companies doesn't mean they don't exist though.

A Phys.org article states that Army researchers are making huge strides in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) that can support U.S. soldiers on the battlefield. Their latest development is an affordable yet capable AI assistant that can reportedly help human troops learn more than 13 times faster than normal training methods. Featuring vastly improved machine learning capabilities, the AI will be installed upon the Army's future ground combat vehicles. It is intended to help a human soldier spot important clues, recognize the developing situation, and come up with a solution to the problem on the fly. The AI would reportedly help preserve American lives during the chaos of combat.

Google is devoting more resources to a research project that seeks to determine whether artificial intelligence can free doctors from the laborious and time-sucking chore of taking notes during medical examinations. According to a report Thursday in CNBC, Google is expanding a program called Medical Digital Assist, which is overseen by Google Brain. Google recently posted four job openings that describe building the "next gen clinical experience...while using audio and touch technology to improve the accuracy and availability of care," the report says. In November, Google said in a blog post that it would begin working with doctors and researchers at Stanford University to explore whether Automatic Speech Recognition and other AI technologies could help lighten the note-taking load for physicians. Studies show that doctors often spend more hours of their workday documenting their patients' medical histories or treatment plans than they do actually treating patients.

Onstage at the launch of Amazon's Alexa Prize, a multimillion-dollar competition to build AI that can chat like a human, the winners of last year's challenge delivered a friendly warning to 2018's hopefuls: your bot will mess up, it will say something offensive, and it will be taken offline. Elizabeth Clark, a member of last year's champion Sounding Board team from the University of Washington, was onstage with her fellow researchers to share what they'd learned from their experience. What stuck out, she said, were the bloopers. "One thing that came up a lot around the holidays was that a lot of people wanted to talk to our bot about Santa," said Clark. "Unfortunately, the content we had about Santa Claus looked like this: 'You know what I realized the other day? Santa Claus is the most elaborate lie ever told.'" The bot chose this line because it had been taught using jokes from Reddit, explained Clark, and while it might be diverting for adults, "as you can imagine, a lot of people who want to talk about Santa Claus … are children." And telling someone's curious three-year-old that Santa is a lie, right before Christmas? That's a conversational faux pas, even if you are just a dumb AI.

A Portland woman recently told a local news outlet that her Amazon Echo device had gone rogue, sending a recording of a private conversation to a random person in her contact list. On Thursday, two senators tasked with investigating consumer privacy sent a letter to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos demanding answers. In the letter, Republican senator Jeff Flake and Democratic senator Chris Coons, who serve respectively as chairman and ranking member of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law, ask Bezos to explain how exactly the Amazon Echo device listens to and stores users' voices. The senators also seek answers about what the company is doing to protect users from having that sensitive information misused. The letter, which was reviewed by WIRED, comes in the midst of what Flake calls a "post-Facebook" world, referring to the data privacy scandal in which Facebook says the data of as many as 87 million Americans may have been misappropriated by a political consulting firm called Cambridge Analytica.

If there's one thing that the future of healthcare can't seem to escape, it's the promise and potential of artificial intelligence (AI). Though the field has been around for quite some time, it wouldn't be until IBM's Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in a series of seven chess games in 1997 that people would really begin taking machine learning and AI seriously. After two decades, IBM would be pushing another AI machine into the public eye, this time dubbed Watson, and presented as a game-changer for healthcare. Unfortunately, the hype hasn't quite lived up to the reality, prompting Chamath Palihapitiya, an influential tech investor who founded the VC firm Social Capital, to call Watson is "a joke" in May 2017 via CNBC. The good news is that, according to David H. Freedman writing for Technology Review, "most of the criticism of Watson … doesn't seem rooted in any particular flaw in the technology. Instead, it's a reaction to IBM's overly optimistic claims of how far along Watson would be by now. In fact, it still seems likely that Watson Health will be a leader in applying AI to health care's woes."

An increasing number of companies are exploring the realms of artificial intelligence and a wide array of innovative use cases are coming to light. Enterprises of all sizes are considering how and when to incorporate AI into their products and services, which is not at all surprising when you consider the vast opportunities for personalized customer engagement. In fact, AI can be used to tailor every moment and conversation with a customer by learning and applying their preferences, behaviors and emotions to shape human-like interactions. Amazon Alexa, Google Home and Apple's HomeKit have all piqued consumer interest in new AI-based "smart" technology. Many industry leaders are successfully using AI in their back-end systems. For example, Netflix has just 90 seconds to grab a subscriber's attention; if they don't find engaging content in that minute and a half, subscribers lose interest.