In early 2014, Srikanth Thirumalai met with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Thirumalai, a computer scientist who'd left IBM in 2005 to head Amazon's recommendations team, had come to propose a sweeping new plan for incorporating the latest advances in artificial intelligence into his division. He arrived armed with a "six-pager." Bezos had long ago decreed that products and services proposed to him must be limited to that length, and include a speculative press release describing the finished product, service, or initiative. Now Bezos was leaning on his deputies to transform the company into an AI powerhouse. Amazon's product recommendations had been infused with AI since the company's very early days, as had areas as disparate as its shipping schedules and the robots zipping around its warehouses. But in recent years, there has been a revolution in the field; machine learning has become much more effective, especially in a supercharged form known as deep learning. It has led to dramatic gains in computer vision, speech, and natural language processing. In the early part of this decade, Amazon had yet to significantly tap these advances, but it recognized the need was urgent. This era's most critical competition would be in AI--Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft were betting their companies on it--and Amazon was falling behind.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is getting a lot of attention from investors these days and with good reason. It's a technology with the potential to transform everything from transportation to cloud computing. Many companies are betting that AI will influence not just their products and services, but nearly every aspect of their business. Read on to discover nine things you may not have to know about this burgeoning technology. Artificial intelligence is often used as a catch-all to describe computer systems that can learn.

Basic machine learning technology is already used by some procurement applications in areas such as spend analytics and contract analytics. This is mostly limited to automating the processes of collecting, cleaning, classifying and analyzing expenditure data in an organization -- to identify savings or paths to greater efficiency. Today, procurement technology vendors are creating cognitive procurement advisors (CPAs) and virtual personal assistants (VPAs) that use natural-language processing (NLP) and natural-language generation to further increase automation and efficiency. "A procurement VPA can improve the end-user experience of traditional procurement tools and increase spend under management by guiding people to the correct purchasing tool," said Magnus Bergfors, research director at Gartner. "A CPA can provide summaries, recommendations and advice in everything from supplier assessments and performance management, to risk management and compliance."

Another year older and wiser, and the digital advertising industry shows few signs of slowing down. To understand the current landscape and get a sense of what lies ahead, we dug deep into industry data as well as the Marin Advertising Index--which represents billions of dollars of annual ad spend on the Marin platform. I hope you enjoy the result--our list of 10 digital advertising trends that promise increasing opportunities and unique challenges for global advertisers. By the end of 2017, Google and Facebook owned 63 percent of the U.S. digital ad market and 54 percent of digital ad revenue worldwide, according to eMarketer. Nationally, Microsoft grew but remained a distant third place, claiming four percent of the total U.S. revenue share.

While Microsoft continues to be buoyed by enterprise and cloud services like Azure, chief executive Satya Nadella tried to reassure analysts that Microsoft still has a consumer strategy: Xbox, PC gaming, and devices powered by digital assistants like Cortana. With the demise of consumer products like the Zune music player, Groove Music Pass, and Windows phones, some customers have wondered whether Microsoft indeed has a consumer strategy in mind. "When I come home at night, I'm talking to Alexa... not Cortana," one analyst said during a Microsoft investor call on Thursday. "Our real strategy going forward is not only to do great work on the console but also complement that with the work we're doing on the PC," Nadella replied. PC gaming is a growth market, Nadella said, and Microsoft's goal is to bring those platforms together: via its Game Pass subscription service (an Xbox-only offering for now); its Mixer streaming service, where gamers can stream themselves as they play either PC or Xbox games; and mobile gaming, where Nadella highlighted the fact that Minecraft has been ported to pretty much everything.

Amazon Alexa users can now send SMS messages through the voice assistant, the company announced via TechCrunch. The Amazon feature comes as Apple takes pre-orders for its own smart speaker: the HomePod. The Apple device will allow users to send iMessages and SMS text messages by using Siri. As of Tuesday, U.S. Alexa users can send text messages to their contacts in the Alexa app by simply asking the voice assistant. Alexa already has a voice calling and its own messaging system.

For buyers of AI technology, the two largest gaps in expectations vs. reality are the current capability of A.I. and what implementation of these tools actually looks like. Artificial intelligence is facing a PR problem today. Ironically, many of the people building AI software can take a bit of blame for it. As a business building a new category of software, it's difficult to strike the balance between exciting people about your solution and over-hyping the possibilities, and there are still a lot of misconceptions about both the technology and the human impact of deploying A.I. within companies. Our company, Talla, has spoken with thousands of executives in the last couple years and now I want to set the record straight regarding the state of the ecosystem and what adopting A.I. means for your organization. The two largest mismatches in expectation vs. reality for buyers are: How much can A.I. agents really help you and your people?

The following article about artificial intelligence for UX has been written by Josh Sutton, Global Head, Data & Artificial Intelligence at Publicis.Sapient. Publicis is one of the world's largest. Editing and formatting added by the TechEmergence team. For information about our thought leadership and publishing arrangements with brands, please visit our partnerships page. The world is transforming at a faster rate than we have seen before.

So much for needing your phone to send text messages. Thanks to a new software update, you can now use Alexa to deliver SMS text messages to any phone. There are some caveats, however. It only works for Alexa users in the US with an Android device that also have the Alexa app installed on their phone. You also can't use the feature to text 911 or participate in group text messages.

Give us your feedback Thank you for your feedback. Whether you leave business school to become a corporate manager, a professional high performer or an entrepreneur, you will spend much of your time on tasks unrelated to your expertise. Only the most senior executives now have dedicated personal assistants and so the more mundane work of email, scheduling meetings and booking travel eats up your time. A new generation of employees is looking for ways to reclaim that time so they can spend it finding solutions to serious problems: the work that will get them credit and help them advance. This work also develops their expertise and helps them remain valuable when artificial intelligence finally becomes clever enough to do all the most predictable tasks.