Every year seems to have its business trends. Last year it was digital transformation. For small businesses, it can be hard to distinguish hype from reality. It can also be difficult to embrace AI with the same fervor as large companies because AI talent is scarce and expensive. In this case, small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) are once again trying to keep up with a potentially game-changing technology that might be out of their price range.

Consumers now experience AI mostly through image recognition to help categorize digital photographs and speech recognition that helps power digital voice assistants such as Apple Inc's Siri or Amazon.com But at a press briefing in San Francisco two days before Ng's Landing.ai In many factories, workers look over parts coming off an assembly line for defects. Ng showed a video in which a worker instead put a circuit board beneath a digital camera connected to a computer and the computer identified a defect in the part. Ng said that while typical computer vision systems might require thousands of sample images to become "trained," Landing.ai's

With virtual assistants answering our emails and robots replacing humans on manufacturing assembly lines, mass unemployment due to widespread automation seems imminent. But it is easy to forget amid our growing unease that these systems are not "all-knowing" and fully competent. As many of us have observed in our interactions with artificial intelligence, these systems perform repetitive, narrowly defined tasks very well but are quickly stymied when asked to go off script -- often to great comical effect. As technological advances eliminate historic roles, previously unimaginable jobs will arise in the new economic reality. We combine these two ideas to map out potential new jobs that may arise in the highly automated economy of 2030.

Consumers now experience AI mostly through image recognition to help categorize digital photographs and speech recognition that helps power digital voice assistants such as Apple Inc's Siri or Amazon.com But at a press briefing in San Francisco two days before Ng's Landing.ai In many factories, workers look over parts coming off an assembly line for defects. Ng showed a video in which a worker instead put a circuit board beneath a digital camera connected to a computer and the computer identified a defect in the part. Ng said that while typical computer vision systems might require thousands of sample images to become "trained," Landing.ai's

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Background After existing mostly in the realm of science fiction for decades, artificial intelligence is increasingly becoming science fact in our everyday lives. Products like IBM's Watson, which bested humans on the game show "Jeopardy!" a few years ago, have given way to electronic home assistants like Amazon's Alexa and smartphone-based aides like Apple's Siri and Google Assistant. AI and machine learning aren't yet all the way there -- and tech industry giant Elon Musk has been among those saying there's real reason to be worried about these technologies getting beyond human control -- but there's more than enough to the industry at this point to interest investors and governments around the world, and AI's effect on the economy is likely to only get bigger in the coming years. Through early October, 2017 merger-and-acquisition activity in AI totaled $2.39 billion over 141 deals. That compares with 89 deals for $1.87 billion in all of 2016, and 35 deals worth $371.8 million in 2015.

In the next few years, expect smart clothing and accessories to become more fashionable and integrate more seamlessly into our daily lives. The wearable tech market is still relatively young and in flux. Fitbit, the company that arguably led the first wave of interest in wearables, didn't start making a wrist-based fitness tracker until 2013. Now, just about every major tech firm – and a slew of scrappy startups – has its own "smart" garment or accessory to peddle, whether in the form of a watch, ring, pendant, sports bra, shoe or something else. By 2020, the global appetite for wearable devices is expected to grow to around $34 billion, with roughly 411 million of the smart devices sold, according to industry analyst firm CCS Insight.

If there's any emerging technology that's gripped the public consciousness in recent years it's AI and machine learning (ML). Autonomous vehicles, shopping recommendations, Siri and Alexa, these are just a few of the day to day examples of the rapid evolution of ML applications. The fervour around AI and ML's development is only fuelling these advancements. As public interest grows we're already seeing more students attracted to ML and AI courses. Just look at the popularity of Professor Andrew Ng's Coursera course on machine learning or the record number of Stanford students who enrolled in the machine learning class this semester.

At Microsoft's Everyday AI event they announced a number of new features coming to Bing and Cortana and Office, all driven by their AI advances. One interesting new Bing feature will be automatically displaying multiple viewpoints for controversial searches such as "is cholesterol bad for you?" culled from a number of recognized news sources, in an effort to break user's filter bubble and expose them to other points of view. Bing will also soon help users craft their searches better prompting them to supply more information to narrow down their results. It will also offer a more powerful image search, being able to recognize and search specific objects in a photo. Lastly, Bing will be indexing Reddit's data, surfacing information about subreddits and extracting useful data from AMAs.

With 41 per cent of internet users admitting to looking online for health-related questions, it's important that they can find quality content. But a new study suggests that smart assistants aren't quite as good as Google searches at providing quality advice when it comes to sexual health. The researchers hope their findings will encourage internet users to treat health information online with caution. A new study suggests that smart assistants aren't quite as good as Google searches at providing quality advice when it comes to sexual health (stock image) Researchers from the University of Otago asked Apple's Siri and Google Assistant to answer questions and perform tasks. The team selected 50 questions to test the software and then compared their answers with a laptop based Google search.