We all know that getting a new car can be an exhilarating experience for the buyer -- from the "new car smell" to that first getaway road trip that we all dream of. But there's no denying that some aspects of the car-buying process are sub-optimal and truly frustrating for car buyers. Since every dealer wants to deliver the best experience for their customers, my firm recently commissioned a survey to learn more about the realities of the car-buying process. We explored attitudes and pain points and also sought to understand more about how automation can improve the car-buying experience. The issues that consumers experience when it comes to buying a new car are significant to our industry because roughly one in five Americans (some 19 percent) have bought a new car or truck in the past year or plan to buy one in the coming year.

Martin Puryear is head of curriculum and technology at Coding Dojo, a 14-week coding bootcamp that teaches full-stack development. Last January I wrote a TechCrunch post predicting the major programming trends of 2016. But in the software development world, things can change very quickly. It can be difficult to see the high-level trends clearly through all the chatter about shiny new development languages, frameworks and tools. So, as we near the end of 2016, how accurate were my predictions?

The Alexa skills economy is still in its infancy. On a lark, Joel Wilson started developing skills for Alexa, Amazon's voice assistant, this past January. After a few weeks of coding, he launched two skills -- Amazon's term for voice-controlled apps -- called Question of the Day and Three Questions. I was just doing it for fun," said Wilson, 47, CEO of a small marketing analytics company in Washington, DC. Joel Wilson has created skills such as Three Questions and Question of the Day. In May, he got an email from Amazon telling him to expect a check in the mail as part of a new program that pays cash to makers of popular skills. That first month, Amazon sent him $2,000. It got better from there. He's received checks for $9,000 over each of the past three months, he said. Wilson unexpectedly joined a new Alexa economy, a small but fast-growing network of independent developers, marketing companies and Alexa tools makers. They're working to bring you voice-activated flash briefings, games and recipes through Amazon's Echo speaker, Alexa's primary home. By doing so, they hope to define the 3-year-old Alexa platform and make money from voice computing's surging popularity. Two years ago, there wasn't nearly as much to do on Alexa and the market for making Alexa skills was worth a mere $500,000. Now, with more than 25,000 skills available, the market is expected to hit $50 million in 2018, according to analytics firm VoiceLabs. That's dwarfed by the mobile app economy, with global sales of over $50 billion, but Alexa is growing at a far faster rate. Customers rarely pay these developers and marketers directly, but they have a big stake in these workers' efforts. Their success, or failure, will determine the number and the quality of skills, such as more complex games, better smart-home controls and more services from companies like Lyft or Domino's Pizza. Alexa is an increasingly important business for Amazon, which is expanding the assistant into millions of internet-connected gadgets and moving it into the workplace. Drawing in more developers will help the company sell more Alexa-powered devices and strengthen its top-dog status in voice. It's sold more than 20 million Echo speakers in the US, taking up 70 percent of the market and helping Alexa become the most active voice market for developers today. "Every skill makes Alexa smarter or more useful," Rob Pulciani, director of Amazon Alexa, said in a statement to CNET. "We can't do that by ourselves and we want to enable indie developers to innovate and extend Alexa capabilities at a rapid pace.

Many industries are already looking for ways to apply AI. More Individuality through Big Data Artificial Intelligence is a key element of Big Data – also called the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The rational behind is simple and complex at the same time: to find out as much as possible about a customer by using comprehensive data management to then use the insights in order to meet the customer's individual needs. Big Bata stands for individuality. The essential resource is data – huge amounts of data.

LOS ANGELES -- Looking back at 2017's tech products that bombed, none of these misses was more glaring than some wild video sunglasses that didn't exactly snap with consumers. The cute $129 video sunglasses called Spectacles from Snapchat parent Snap were initially hard to get. Then Snap put them on sale nationally in February and the broader based of national consumers showed little interest in the product, leaving a backlog of thousands of unsold glasses, and a $40 million write-down from Snap. A Wi-Fi enabled juicer with a sky-high price tag of $400 didn't make a lot of sense to consumers, especially when it required a subscription to buy proprietary Juicero bags of fruit to turn into juice. Another blow against this product was the discovery that squeezing the bags with your raw hands worked just as well as turning on the juicer.

This might be a helpful time to clarify that AI is often a catch-all term for an assortment of different technologies. There's artificial intelligence in our digital assistants like Siri, Alexa, Cortana and the Google Assistant. You'll find artificial intelligence in software like Facebook's Messenger chatbots and Gmail's auto-replies. It's defined as "intelligence displayed by machines" but also refers to situations when computers do things without human instructions. Then there's machine-learning, which is when computers teach themselves how to perform tasks that humans do.

We've all heard or read about how robots are going to take away our jobs. Saudi Arabia even went as far as granting citizenship to "Sophia the robot" back in October (See the video below). With crytocurrency at the top of daily headlines, 2017 may be remembered as the year artificial intelligence (AI, pronounced AYE-EYE) goes mainstream with more organizations adopting AI than ever. Two weeks ago, we wrote about Professor Geoffrey Hinton, known worldwide as the Godfather of AI, and how his research work in the area of Neuro Net was used in speech recognition and Android voice search. Yes, we've made a lot of progress since AI started as an academic discipline in 1956.

Occasional creepiness notwithstanding, kids seem to love Alexa. Jeremy Cornforth works at the State Department in Washington and is the father of 5-year-old twins. When he brought home an Echo, "We just told them it was a speaker, and it was a computer, and it could understand the things they said. They took to it immediately," he said. "There's a little power struggle now over who gets to control it."

After jumping head first into the hardware game last year with the Pixel phones and Home smart speaker, Google seriously picked up the pace in 2017. Not only were there two awesome new Pixel phones, but also smaller and larger Google Home devices, as well as a pair of Pixel-branded earbuds. And through it all, Google's AI-powered Assistant got smarter and smarter. Google took its share of lumps over the past 12 months, and proved that making great hardware isn't as easy as it looks. The Pixel 2 is a gret follow-up to Google's first handset.

This article is part of CMO.com's December series about 2018 trends, predictions, and new opportunities. We're all aware of the immense impact that technology has had on the ways in which consumers interact with brands. Think about some early inventions--such as the telephone in 1876 and the television in 1926--which gave businesses an easy way to connect with consumers on a more intimate level, from the comfort of their homes. Fast-forward to the late 1970s, when people could purchase personal computers, and next, 1991, when the Internet (World Wide Web) became available to the world. Both brought with them dramatic changes.