Digital recruitment – think Monster and LinkedIn – is routine today. But what if a voice-powered AI assistant like Amazon's Alexa could find the best candidate for a critical role just by asking it? By leveraging the power of social networks and data and analytics, enterprising employers already are sourcing, screening and retaining talent more efficiently and effectively, so this scenario is not that far away. Networked talent sourcing: Savvy sourcing recruiters find the right talent faster by leveraging social networks, web 2.0, newsgroups, blogs and online data sources to scan "passive" talent pools. Oracle's subsidiary Opower employs such talent analytics to hire about 200 employees annually.

Amazon has unveiled a new set of skills for its Echo smart speakers called Alexa Blueprints. The new feature make it easy for anyone to create custom responses to Alexa queries. There's no code to write, no files to upload, and really nothing to learn. Anyone with a web browser can create a custom skill in mere minutes that will be accessible to any Echo device in your home. When I tried it out this morning, I didn't even need to watch the minute-long instructional video to figure it out.

Amazon's Alexa devices can be a lot of fun, but her answers aren't always the ones you'd like to hear. Now you can easily create your own personal Alexa skills with one of more than 20 pre-made Blueprints, swapping in your own content for Amazon's. It's always been possible to write custom Alexa skills, but that involved computer programming or learning some sort of third-party tool. With Blueprints, that barrier is gone for anyone interested in creating private skills available just for devices registered to their own account. Categories include Fun & Games, Learning & Knowledge, At Home, and Storyteller.

Few people know artificial intelligence better than Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria. The Spanish entrepreneur has engineering degrees and diplomas from MIT, Harvard Business School and the Universidad de Deusto in Bilbao, the largest city in Spain's Basque Country. He is even nearing a master's degree in architecture, is a mentor at Oxford University and has won numerous awards for his work in the tech world. Uribe-Etxebarria is also a proven company-builder. He was studying for a natural language processing PhD in 2009 when he built his first firm, ANBOTO, a virtual assistant for chat and email responses. But Uribe-Etxebarria wasn't finished, and in 2012 founded Sherpa, a predictive, virtual personal assistant based on AI algorithms.

Machine learning and AI are ubiquitous these days, and people are finding all kinds of creative ways to use it in the realm of research. Here are a few ways Elsevier and our innovative collaborators are using it. Big data and machine learning platforms can also do more than fuel recommendation engines. They can become part of the scientific discourse by performing a task they're particularly suited to – scanning vast amounts of information to unearth connections that lead to new hypotheses. A pilot program between Elsevier and the Euretos AI platform aims to use these technologies to scan millions of journal articles and hundreds of databases to make connections and suggest new hypotheses for researchers to investigate.

Google IO 2018 is just weeks away, with the event happening in early May, and it's sure to be used to unveil a bunch of Android software goodies and potentially even some new hardware. We don't know much about IO 2018 yet, but Google has begun teasing the event, giving us a few clues as to what we might see – and when. We've also come up with a wish list for what we want from Google's annual developer conference, which you'll find at the bottom of this page. Google took to Twitter in January to tease IO 2018, and that tweet led users to the google.com/io That's not particularly surprising, as Google IO is usually held in May, but this would be slightly earlier in the month than usual.

Consumers will be able to speak to the Google Assistant on a smartphone or a Google Home device to initiate a conversation about the bank's service offerings. OCBC Bank becomes the first bank to offer voice-based banking in Singapore. The Google Assistant will provide consumers with another self-service digital channel to interact with OCBC Bank that is embedded in consumers' lives. The consumers can get instant responses by posing general banking questions to the Google Assistant at any time of the day. This integration complements other self-service digital channels such as AI-powered chatbot'Emma', which was launched in 2017 and is specialised in answering home and renovation loan queries on the OCBC Bank website.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies like digital assistants, chatbots, and customized shopping recommendations on Amazon is not perceived to be as pervasive as some think. Only 42% percent of consumers in a recent survey by Genpact, a global professional services firm, say they interact with some form of AI regularly (i.e. The study is part of a three-part research series exploring AI perceptions of C-suite and other senior business executives, the workforce, and consumers. The undeniably increasing pervasiveness of these technologies carries significant implications for work in the future, and consumer preferences around the customer service experience. As worker and consumer concerns around artificial intelligence continue to evolve, it is critical for businesses to understand and be responsive to these issues to best succeed in the new AI world.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a hotly discussed and debated subject in 2018. From newspapers to world leaders, everyone is talking about what machine intelligence and robotics could and might do for businesses. With all the buzz it is generating, Artificial Intelligence is rapidly emerging as a lucrative technology. By 2035, global consulting firm Accenture has suggested that Artificial Intelligence could add an estimated £654 billion to the UK economy. It comes as little surprise then to see an increasing number of businesses adding AI into their operations.

The modern consumer is acutely aware of their power in the marketplace. If they do not like a particular customer experience, they can quickly vote with their feet (or mouse) and move to a more customer-centric competitor. Businesses have discovered that if they want to retain clients, they need to improve how they perform. Many have found that AI can improve the customer experience. Artificial intelligence has helped streamline the retail customer experience. It has contributed to speeding up customer interaction and reducing consumer frustration.