Together, these technologies can provide critical data about customers' experience with products, provide information for customers to take action on, and more. As companies gather and use this data, they can provide better customer experience but also help to develop new products or features in next-generation products. Ultimately, Leary said, this new influx of product, usage and customer data is about creating a new customer experience. Leary used the example of a smart refrigerator whose temperature and be adjusted automatically, or have a broken part sent out to the customer, even before he is aware that the part is malfunctioning. It also enables companies to gather new information about product usage that can enhance customer relationships or product development.

Ask 10 CIOs how they define digital transformation and you're likely to get 10 different answers with one common theme: a laundry list of technology projects intended to foster sweeping business changes. Even so, digital transformation isn't so easily defined. Surely, digital transformation involves a radical rethinking of how an organization uses technology in pursuit of new revenue streams or new business models. And it also requires cross-departmental collaboration in pairing business-focused philosophies with rapid application development models. But for many organizations, digital transformation is really digital optimization in disguise, as new digital initiatives merely augment existing services.

Insurance agency management company In-Fi is hoping AI chatbots can streamline homeowner insurance applications and bring the process in line with customers' expectations. Edge intelligence is the newborn child of edge analytics and machine learning. In this podcast, CTO Simon Crosby explains the tech and discusses AI uses, data breaches and more. Can an AI virtual assistant in every car save the auto industry from sluggish sales and an uncertain future? Audio component manufacturer Harman argues that it can help.

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.