AI is everywhere these days. It powers our personal assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Home, prevents credit card fraud, and even successfully overturns parking fines. With each passing month, AI becomes ever more integral to our world. Last week we learned how AI is changing the job of designers. But the impact goes further than that.

"Hey Siri, what is IIoT?" Every time you ask Siri, you get an accurate answer. Wonder how your virtual assistant suggests, thinks and talks like a human being? Because it has been taught that way through machine learning. Finance, retail and healthcare are just a few of the many industries that are benefitted by machine learning.

Today's AI technologies are more intelligent and contextual than ever before. The rise of digital assistants like Alexa and Siri that allow us to carry out a myriad of tasks with minimal effort – has made many consumers wonder "why can't everything be this easy?". As a result, businesses are starting to tap into this trend and are seeing the huge potential AI – not just to help the customer journey, but also to streamline processes, reduce costs and increase productivity of their service agents. Today, AI is serving on the frontlines of customer service, handling the repetitive tasks that previously took up the majority of an agent's time – freeing them up to focus their time and energy on more complex and high-value engagements. See also: AI's impact on customer experience Additionally, AI is playing co-pilot to the agents – helping them deliver more personalized service by prompting them with information on a customer's history with the brand, preferences, and sharing suggestions and offers that particular customer may appreciate.

Careful with using Alexa or Google around your pet birds -- your feathered friend might end up ordering up some crackers. An African grey Congo parrot in Florida has apparently mastered Amazon's Alexa digital home assistant and has already moved on to conquering Google Home. Not so nice -- the first thing Petra the parrot learned to do was to order all the lights off, at random. "First, you're like half awake and … like, 'Was that a dream? The parrot has even earned its own YouTube channel, currently at more than 13,000 subscribers. Some of the more meta videos show Petra watching her own interviews on television, Facetiming with other parrots, and telling the dog to "Dance!

When Amazon first came out with a smart recommendation algorithm for customers, millions of consumers receive their first tailored shopping experience personalized to their own interests. This changed the consumer world and introduced us to a whole new era of shopping. Amazon's algorithms, using a method called "item-to-item collaborative filtering", are able to provide targeted shopping recommendations by creating a personalized experience for each person. Even in a very basic form, this was the beginning of using machine learning in a very practical manner. But can such artificial intelligence and machine learning also act as an enabler for changes in medicine and healthcare, as much as Amazon's algorithm changed consumerism?

We've been expecting voice-powered virtual assistants in financial apps for a while now -- Bank of America started developing its own back in 2016. Dubbed Erica, the virtual assistant is now ready to roll out to the bank's 25 million mobile clients across the US, from now through June of this year. Bank of America customers can use Erica to search for past transactions across all their accounts, navigate the mobile app to find routing numbers or the closest ATM, view bills and schedule payments, lock (and then unlock) debit cards and transfer money between accounts (or send money to others with Zelle). Erica will even help you learn more about your credit scores and connect you to the company's financial education product, Better Money Habits. Erica was trained in part with an employee-only pilot program last year, which helped the system integrate more than 200,000 ways for people to ask financial questions.

Apple hasn't shed much light on how its HomePod-connected speaker is selling, but research firm Strategy Analytics has some insight. The $349 speaker, Apple's high-end answer to the Amazon Echo and Google Home, doesn't look to be sizing up to an iPhone, iPad or even Apple Watch-sized hit. Strategy Analytics says Apple sold 600,000 HomePod speakers -- which first went on sale in February -- during the first quarter, representing 6% market share of the smart speaker market. At the same time, Amazon shipped some 4 million Echo speakers, representing 43.6% market share, to 2.4 million speakers for Google, which had 26.5% share. This is quite a drop for Amazon, which had 81.8% market share in the same quarter a year ago, to Google's then 12.4%.

As a contributor to The Fourth Education Revolution, Sir Anthony Seldon's new book on artificial intelligence (AI) in education, I've been thinking a lot recently about how AI could help in teaching and learning. Perhaps a few years from now we'll see widespread use of "digital tutors" that help reduce teacher workload by coaching and mentoring learners, building on the likes of Siri and Alexa. But there's also a darker side that we need to be wary of. It emerges that a pupil has been cheating by submitting homework assignments generated by an artificial intelligence. Another pupil has pranked the school's IT systems by feeding them false data, resulting in the heating being turned up to full blast on the hottest day of the year.

It was the haircut booking heard round the world. On May 8, Google demoed a new Google Assistant feature called Duplex, a technology designed to tackle our tedious phone conversations. Don't feel like making a restaurant reservation or calling the salon? Let an AI do it for you. During the AI demo, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told the audience, "What you're going to hear is the Google Assistant actually calling a real salon to schedule an appointment for you."

Google is working on some nifty new features for Google Maps, including a short list of your favorite places, the possibility of a'virtual positioning system' and more. Assistant is coming to Google Maps in a big way, with a ton of new shortcuts, as well as the ability for the digital assistant to text your friend when you're on your way. Google is rolling out a tool called'Your Match', which uses machine learning to determine your location and interests, serving up targeted suggestions for new businesses opening up in your area and more.