While we don't have access to a fortune teller to predict how the banking landscape will look in 10, 20 or 30 years, we can make some highly educated guesses about what's on the horizon based on what we currently know. One thing that's become readily apparent is that the bank of the future will be invisible. Nor does it mean that all banking transactions will occur on a mobile app or online portal. Rather, the evolution into invisibility will see traditional aspects of banks fade away as financial institutions become more of a white-labeled product provider. Things like customer service call centers, individual branches and even sales teams will gradually be replaced by digitized self-service technologies.

With the wave of personal assistants, such as Siri, Cortana and Google Assistant, and new startups leveraging AI and analytics to build personal companions, it's becoming clear we are moving toward a new voice-controlled relationship with technology. As we have already seen in the consumer market, it is all but a given that these voice-activation systems will eventually make it into the enterprise environment, as the potential benefits of these systems could be tremendous in simplifying and automating activities. Although it may be a long time before we see the full likenesses of "HAL" from "2001: A Space Odyssey", the technology is already here that can improve the ways businesses operate. Think how much easier it would be for a physician to just say "System: update Mary Smith's chart with the following: "Patient experiencing abdominal pain, issue pharmacy order for 200MG of'SuperAntiGas', signed Dr. FeelBetter." Or in a conference room, instead of the struggle to figure out which remote control puts on the projector and the screen, a simple voice request "System: turn on projector, turn on TV and dim lights."

China faces an acute shortage of doctors. Even in China's first-tier cities - Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Shenzhen and Tianjin - many Chinese must wait in long lines at hospitals and clinics to receive examinations, diagnosis and treatment. The World Health Organization issued a report in 2016 disclosing that in China, there's a ratio: 1.5 doctors for every 1,000 people, while in the United States, it's 2.4 per 1,000 and in the United Kingdom, 2.8 per 1,000. Apparently, new solutions are required to help Chinese doctors reduce workloads. Hence, Chinese developers of Artificial Intelligence (AI) may have found the answer.

In Texas, a child asks an Amazon Echo to "play dollhouse with me and get me a dollhouse?" In England, the words "OK Google, what is the Whopper burger?" in a Burger King advertisement trigger Google Home smart speakers to start spouting descriptions of the burgers. And sometime soon, your car may choose the best price for maintenance or an electric charge, as well as driving itself to the appointment. Welcome to the new world where intelligent machines, rather than people, make more and more decisions about what to buy, at what price, and complete the transactions without a middleman over a blockchain distributed ledger. This will mean massive new markets for everything from home supplies ordered via "smart speakers" such as Amazon Echo to electricity ordered by smart thermostats to replacement parts and raw materials purchased by manufacturing robots or optimisation algorithms for cyber physical systems of machines.

From The Terminator to Blade Runner, pop culture has always leaned towards a chilling depiction of artificial intelligence (AI) and our future with AI at the helm. Recent headlines about Facebook panicking because their AI bots developed a language of their own have us hitting the alarm button once again. Should we really feel unsettled with an AI future? News flash: that future is here. If you ask Siri, the helpful assistant who magically lives inside your phone, to read text messages and emails to you, find the nearest pizza place or call your mother for you, then you've made AI a part of your everyday life.

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been called the next Industrial Revolution, and it will have a profound effect on how marketers will need to understand, market and track consumers in the years ahead. In fact, BI Intelligence, in a 2015 report, estimated that more than 34 billion devices will be connected to the internet globally by 2020, up from 10 billion in 2015. This includes a mix of standalone devices that can be monitored and/or controlled from a remote location, as well as remote-enabled devices (such as smartphones, connected/smart TVs, smart home and smart assistants like Amazon's Echo). In many areas, the proliferation of these devices has already passed the tipping point. One such area includes connected/smart TVs.

We have identified about a dozen fundamental artificial intelligence use cases in marketing. We focused on core marketing activities such as optimizing pricing and placement, optimizing advertising/marketing, personalizing recommendations, collecting and leveraging customer feedback. We are always improving our structure and would love to hear your comments and suggestions. Primary marketing activities and AI use cases in these activities are listed below. Pricing optimization: Optimize markdowns to minimize cannibalization while maximizing revenues.

Behind the scenes, the same call automatically and invisibly decides whether a machine learning classifier is reliable enough to classify the example on its own, or whether human intervention is needed. Models get built automatically, they're continually retrained, and the caller never has to worry whether more data is needed. In the rest of this article, we'll go into more detail on the problems we described above--problems that are common to all efforts to deploy machine learning to solve real-world problems. In order to train any spam classifier, you'll first need a training set of "spam" and "not spam" labels.

From self-driving cars, a toothbrush that tells you the best way to brush your teeth to voice recognition software that unlocks your phone, we now live in a world where we can't help but think if we are in a sci-fi film. Many technologies that exist now were only available in the past through imagination and portrayal in science fiction. If "The Jetsons" had Rosie, we now have Mahru Z helping us with our household chores. We also have the real world equivalent of Gideon from The Flash, namely Siri, Alexa and Cortana. People who grew up watching or reading these Science fictions would have never thought they'd experience having a video conference through mobile devices, a robot vacuuming their house, talking to a computer or receiving answers from a computer.

Computing pioneer Alan Turing's most pertinent thoughts on machine intelligence come from a neglected paragraph of the same paper that first proposed his famous test for whether a computer could be considered as smart as a human. The original question, "Can machines think?" I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion. Nevertheless I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted. Turing's 1950 prediction was not that computers would be able to think in the future.