More than seven out of every ten marketers are trusting just one technology to make sense of all their challenges in 2018. And it just might succeed ... if it doesn't also take their jobs. Or if privacy regulations reduce the amount of data available to power it. Artificial intelligence is set to be the most transformative technology in marketing in 2018, according to more than 345 CMOs, CEOs, and marketing experts I surveyed recently. This past year, marketers learned that they had too much data. Too much to understand, and too much data to react to.

If you're in the market for a smart speaker, soundbar, or portable Bluetooth speaker, your decision process just got a little bit more difficult. On December 27, tech titan LG announced its full 2018 audio lineup, featuring a Dolby Atmos-enabled soundbar, a premium AI speaker with Google Assistant, and a line of life-proof, portable speakers built to withstand the elements. The LG ThinQ speaker comes with Google Assistant built in, so you can use your voice to inquire about the weather, answer nagging trivia, and control other smart home devices, among other things. LG is pushing the speaker as an accessory built to interface directly with its other SmartThinQ products, which range from refrigerators to air purifiers to Roomba-like vacuum cleaners. We don't yet know what sort of specs or pricing to expect; the ThinQ could be a competitor for the Amazon Echo around $100, or more of a Sonos-type solution in the $200 range, depending upon audio quality.

According to some dire and sensational headlines, many people will likely soon find themselves in the unemployment line, while a relative of a Roomba moves in to their office, taking over their old job. Few topics have created so much fear, uncertainty and doubt in the workplace as recent developments in robotics and artificial intelligence. As people welcome Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant into their homes and personal lives, they are beginning to wonder if the same technology that answers their questions and assists them in their day-to-day lives could soon replace them in the office and on the factory floor, doing the same work they did – but better, faster, cheaper, 24/7/365. Earlier this year, the Center for Leadership Insight at Russell Reynolds Associates set out to examine how management, finance and administrative workers spend their time at work. Looking at data on 103 different jobs, we classified a total of 1,880 tasks (the specific activities these workers undertake) based on the likelihood that each task would be replaced or disrupted by AI.

And just as we've seen over the past few years, more cord-cutting means more new streaming services, along with better devices on which to watch. Here's the best of everything that cord-cutting had to offer this year: Roku's Streaming Stick isn't the first 4K HDR device to hit $70--that honor went to Google's Chromecast Ultra last year--but it's by far the best value. The Streaming Stick combines Roku's fast and simple interface with a new remote that includes handy buttons for TV volume and power. Unless you feel like spending more than double on an Apple TV 4K or Nvidia Shield TV, this is the UltraHD streamer to get. Calling the Nvidia Shield TV a platform might not be fair, since it's based on the same Android TV software as several other smart TVs and streaming boxes.

LG is acting on its promise to unveil a slew of AI-powered gadgets at CES this January. The tech giant has unveiled a 2018 speaker lineup headlined by the ThinQ Speaker, a Google Assistant-powered device that promises "premium" sound alongside its smarts. It supports lossless high-resolution audio like LG's more advanced phones, and uses Meridian Audio's know-how to pump out "more natural and warm" music. The launch also hints that many of LG's newer appliances will be Assistant-savvy -- the company envisions turning on your air purifier with a voice command. The rest of the lineup is led by the SK10Y soundbar, a 5.1.2-channel

Jeetu Patel, Chief Product Officer at Box, announced the release of the new machine-learning-focused product Box Skills at BoxWorks 2017. To kick off this 25-minute product announcement, Box CEO Aaron Levie talks about the background for Box Skills -- a technology climate heavily influenced by the rise in mobile devices, the power of cloud computing, the unstoppable growth of the internet and the recent focus on machine-learning applications. We're seeing these trends converge in our personal lives in things like virtual personal assistants (Alexa, Siri), but personal applications are just the start for machine learning. Technology in the enterprise is where AI and machine learning will fundamentally change the way we use information in the cloud. Over the past few years, there has been a tremendous amount of innovation (and spending) around machine learning, specifically to solve business-case problems for things like voice recognition and image recognition.

In the not so distant future, we will have machines capable not only of storing data, but of thinking, feeling, and being as intelligent as the human being. Following the new trends in the information technology market, such as tracking digital transformation, is a key factor for organizations seeking to remain competitive with the great competition in the market. With increasingly advanced and sophisticated resources, technological innovations have computer machines that promise to facilitate the routine of companies, where intelligent machines can perform their activities in an optimized way. We are talking about the trend of the future, a revolutionary technology – Artificial Intelligence (AI). Artificial Intelligence is already part of our everyday life, but many times we do not even notice it.

AI autopilots in commercial airlines is a surprisingly early use of AI technology that dates as far back as 1914, depending on how loosely you define autopilot. The New York Times reports that the average flight of a Boeing plane involves only seven minutes of human-steered flight, which is typically reserved only for takeoff and landing. Many high school and college students are familiar with services like Turnitin, a popular tool used by instructors to analyze students' writing for plagiarism. While Turnitin doesn't reveal precisely how it detects plagiarism, research demonstrates how ML can be used to develop a plagiarism detector. Historically, plagiarism detection for regular text (essays, books, etc.) relies on a having a massive database of reference materials to compare to the student text; however, ML can help detect the plagiarizing of sources that are not located within the database, such as sources in foreign languages or older sources that have not been digitized.

You might have watched a movie like The Terminator or I, Robot and considered that the artificial intelligence potential it portrays is a far cry from our current technologies (there's no real fear of bots powered by Samsung Bixby overtaking the planet, that's for sure). After investigating a recently published Google research paper (via Quartz), it looks like we might be closer to this reality than you might think. The paper, titled "Natural TTS Synthesis by Conditioning WaveNet on Mel Spectrogram Predictions," highlights a new Google text-to-speech system called Tacotron 2, which is capable of a near-human level of AI voice reproduction. To achieve this, Tacotron 2 uses a pair of neural networks: one to create a visual representation of specific audio frequencies and a second (called "WaveNet") to recreate this visual data as sound. Google launched a website alongside the paper to show-off what this tech could lead to in practice; there, Google provides examples of how Tacotron 2 handles phrase semantics (like distinguishing between the noun and verb of "present"), intonation and difficult words that might trip some of us humans up like "otolaryngology."

According to app downloads, Amazon beat out its rivals over the holidays. As of writing, the Amazon Alexa app was the most popular app on both iOS and Android's Google Play. On Android, the Google Home app did make its way to second place--so it would look like the Google Home was a popular gift, too. But on iOS, Google's companion app didn't even crack the top 10 most popular apps. While Amazon's devices were a cross-platform favorite, those already embedded in the Google ecosystem were more likely to invest in its smart home speaker products. This is likely what we can expect when Apple comes out with its own Amazon Echo competitor, the HomePod, in early 2018.