Without a doubt, 2016 was the year'disruption' became tangible. Events like Brexit, the U.S. election and India's demonetization exercise brought home the reality we are living in a fast-changing global society where a sense of anti-establishment and rebellion is accelerating change. This shows no sign of stopping in 2017, with new technologies allowing banks to offer service levels more synonymous with hospitality than financial services, and with established technologies like artificial intelligence and robotic process automation seeing a resurgence in combination with new voice commerce models, IoT data, and robo advisors to offer more personal, more contextual and ultimately unique banking experiences for each and every one of us. In meeting with decision-making executives from the U.S to Europe, the Middle East, India and Singapore, I have compiled a clear list of trends that are dominating technology investment discussions across the globe's leading banks. In 2016 we already saw several leaders' like DBS, Santander, Wells Fargo and Bank of America roll out their chatbots, but 2017 is the year when the rebirth of this very old technology will come into its own.

The better you understand your users, the more relevant your financial wellness and chatbot solutions will be and the more meaningful your engagement. Learn how AI helps you detect financial and transactional patterns, predict future events, and become your users' biggest ally when you join this VB Live event. One of the biggest advantages that banks have, aside from their long-established brands and physical ubiquity, is the ability to tap into customer financial data. Now pair that treasure trove of financial data with with artificial intelligence, and you unlock more personalized, predictive, and prescriptive solutions for your customer. From payments to online retail banking, AI powers things like intelligent assistant chatbots that help customers manage their accounts as well as lending and financial wellness solutions that actually help users budget, spend wisely, and save money.

The good: Beautiful screen, long battery life, helpful iris scanner for unlocking the phone, better multitasking The bad: Live Focus camera isn't as good as Apple's Portrait Mode, facial recognition is unreliable, not significantly different than Galaxy S8 and S8 though more expensive Who should buy: Android fans that really care about having a stylus and two cameras should opt for the Note 8, but the Galaxy S8 offers similar features at a lower price. Each year near summer's close Samsung releases a new top-of-the-line Android-powered Galaxy Note phone. It's typically a showcase for the best the industry has to offer, like bold new screens, longer battery life, a superb camera and apps designed to tout these touch-ups. Then, like clockwork, Apple follows with a new iPhone that matches or surpasses Samsung's Note in key areas. With its massive edge-to-edge screen, facial recognition system and dual camera, Samsung's $929 Galaxy Note 8 -- out September 15 and the first new Note since last year's ill-fated Note 7 -- is a shot across Apple's bow as anticipation soars for Cupertino's 10th anniversary iPhone.

Many products or solutions have some inherent unconscious bias coded into them. A bias that exists in the analogue world that is transferred into the digital world. The potential for that can be seen in earlier manifestations of digital personal assistants. One obvious question is: 'why are so many digital assistants presented as female?' Is it because the assumptions that society has around clerical workers is that they are white, middle class, and female?

Have you ever yelled at a customer service agent over the phone? If you answered yes to the latter, then thanks, you've made a significant contribution to the evolution of artificial intelligence. That's because virtual assistants, and the machine learning "brains" behind them, need exposure to natural human language to learn and adapt to the world around them. And how you speak to them is very important. Picking up the intricacies of spoken language requires exposure to slang, back-and-forth conversations, figures of speech, new words, curses, and everything else that's fluid to the human ear.

AI is used extensively in developing voice-enabled assistants like Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana, Apple SIRI or Google Home to perform tasks and get answers. Integrating unified communication platforms and voice-enabled assistants through an intelligent AI engine can automate tasks that might otherwise require human intervention. Based on a specific trigger, the AI engine could instruct the voice assistants to communicate on a specified unified communication channel to deliver a message. For example, in an Enterprise customer that has shopping outlets, AI engine could detect the product count and automatically send a message to the supplier for fulfillment.

When we come across the term Artificial Intelligence (AI), most of us imagine robots and talking computers from movies, prepping for a revolution to overthrow the human race and take over the world. But, in reality, AI is not just evil robots scheming to dominate us. A comprehensive definition by Gartner, explains AI as, "Technology that appears to emulate human performance typically by learning, coming to its own conclusions, appearing to understand complex content, engaging in natural dialogs with people, enhancing human cognitive performance (also known as cognitive computing) or replacing people on execution of nonroutine tasks." Even if we don't realize it, AI is an enormous part of our everyday lives, and its role is only going to grow in a connected world, buoyed by the IoT. Digital voice assistants like Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Amazon's Alexa, and Google's Assistant make us more efficient by helping us multi-task.

If your business wants to attract more qualified traffic and build your brand, then you need to think about the client's journey. Today's consumers are more informed and have more options than ever before when it comes to what they buy and how they buy it. When a customer buys your product or service, that transaction is only one part of their entire experience with your company. If you want to make the purchasing journey as easy as possible for your customers then, you need to think about every touch point that leads up to their purchase. There is so much data out there to consider if you want to optimize the customer journey of your audience.

Men and women take selfies from different angles, and a new study suggests the psychology of attraction is the reason why. Researchers from Florida State University say selfie-takers manipulate camera angles when taking photos of themselves as an'impression-management strategy'. Men take them head-on to attract women, or from below to appear dominant to other men, while women take photos from above to appear more attractive to men. Researchers from Florida State University found selfie-takers manipulate camera angles when taking photos of themselves as an impression-management strategy. Nastasia Makhanova and her team at Florida State University found selfie-takers manipulate camera angles when taking photos of themselves as an impression-management strategy.

Top business leaders will converge at Talking Stick Resort in Scottsdale, Arizona to share and explore how to Unlock the Customer Experience (CX) Tools of Tomorrow at NextCon. NextCon is hosted by Nextiva one of the leading firms in business communication technology, dedicated to providing a unified customer service experience on the cloud. Tomas Gorny, the innovative CEO of Nextiva recently explained where the industry stands: "As the totality of data grows to unimaginable proportion, business owners need to understand not only what is available, but how to extract the bits and bytes they need to build a useful data set. On the surface, analyzing data appears to be about making more sales. But, the very core of data science is about enhancing customer experience. Data helps businesses provide better answers, build better products, and market goods and services that customers actually want."