The steady decline in business profitability across the retail industry threatens to erode future investment, innovation and shareholder value. Fortunately, the age of AI-powered retail is upon us, promising an unprecedented amount of data and information that, if used in the right way, can help retailers grow their businesses and at the same time revolutionize the customer experience. Thanks to Amazon's Alexa and Google Home, the technology is becoming more pervasive. It's changing how we shop, how we experience brands and how we live our everyday lives. As AI becomes normal for today's consumers, it's hard to believe that, as recently as the turn of the Millennium, the technology was mostly restricted to science fiction and the horizon-scans of the most forward-thinking companies.

In an effort to curb unwanted sexual images from being sent to others, the platform announced this week its special pledge for members. People sending harassing or unwanted sexually explicit messages will be banned." A survey last year said 61 percent of women received unwanted sexually explicit images, while 40 percent said they received it more than once. Now, the question remains as to whether the pledge will actually stop users from sending unwanted sexually explicit photos.

It's been a little over a year since our Digital Banking Tracker heralded the "Dawn of Banking Voice Technology." Santander U.K. started the trend by launching a voice assistant within SmartBank, its mobile banking app for students, before rolling it out to the general public. In the early days, adopters of the new technology mostly used it to check card spend at the end of the week or month. By winter, customers were able to move beyond simply asking questions and begin conducting actual transactions using their voice -- although they still had to log in to the app using a password. Meanwhile, it's been exactly a year since Barclays announced news that it was doing away with passwords and replacing them with voice recognition technology for identity verification.

LAS VEGAS, NV - JANUARY 04: Tim Baxter, President and Chief Operating Officer of Samsung Electronics America, speaks during a press event for CES 2017 at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center on January 4, 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Almost 250 years after James Watt filed his first patent in 1769, we have reached a turning point in this new industrial revolution, as ecosystem evolutions enable a new wave of innovative products to come to life. Based on analysis of over 200 hardware startups, the HAX Hardware Trends Report has identified six key ways the world of connected devices has evolved and will impact our lives in the coming years. If Internet was a revolution, it was only the beginning: the physical world is being re-invented and every industry is being affected, from construction to insurance. Investment is booming with 36 startups having raised over US$100M (there were only 8 of them three years ago) and there are 18 unicorns (private companies with a valuation above US$1B), representing close to 10% of the global blessing.

With the progressing year, the technology diversified ways in which we could communicate and retrieve the information from the pocket fitting devices. Technologies such as IoT, automation, and cognitive computing moved beyond the conceptual stages in 2016. As the year takes up, companies throughout the world are developing their business strategies. In order to move forward in the competition, companies are turning towards major investments in technology. The world's biggest consumer technology convention, CES is one of the best places to find a handful of key technologies. CES 2017 finished another spectacular year with pioneering technology trends including smart homes to self-driving cars. This year is assumed to bring transformative technology trends for us to explore and invest in. AI, also known as Artificial Intelligence has been studied for decades and now the vision of transforming insentient objects into intelligence is gradually becoming a reality. AI based Innovations are now pondering into the market and becoming part of our daily lives with quick adaptability. Artificial intelligence assists humans and handles the tasks flawlessly, without interrupting your comfort. Whether to set an alarm, or remind you of something important, or to play your favorite music or to read out general news for you or to find your phone, AI can make the task more convenient and smart. Sit back and relax while you command your device to do things for you.

Y Combinator backed Plasticity is tackling the problem of getting software systems to better understand text, using deep learning models trained to understand what they're reading on Wikipedia articles -- and offering an API for developers to enhance their own interfaces. Specifically they're offering two APIs for developers to build "more robust conversational interfaces", as they put it -- with the aim of becoming a "centralized solution" for Natural Language Processing (NLP). Their APIs are due to be switched from private to public beta on Monday. "One thing where we think this is really useful for is conversational interfaces where you want to integrate real world knowledge," says co-founder Alex Sands. "We think it's also really useful when you want to provide instant answers in your application -- whether that's over the entire Internet or over a custom corpus."

Canadian Kaylee Kapital revealed her Tinder date took her to the hospital where he worked -- and even showed her a dead body for kicks. In a video on her YouTube channel, Kapital said she met the man through an app and their first two dates were reasonably normal -- dinner and a movie. But she admitted there were warning signs. She said: "This guy was really weird, I'm a natural redhead and he would always make fun of ginger people." "I should have got a lot of red flags but I was on the rebound after being dumped so I was like I just want to get out there and have fun."

This week, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) launched a working group focusing on artificial intelligence and machine learning in response to "significant member interest." Make no mistake, AI is quickly coming off the pages of science fiction and being implemented across the marketing, media, and advertising industries. So, what is AI and how exactly can brands make the best use of it? Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an umbrella term for a large number of technologies that can train software to think and learn on its own. That might sound rather lofty, but if you look around in the digital world, low-level AI is already being deployed in things from simple spam filters to the recommendation engines on ecommerce sites.

An advertisement posted on Craigslist on August 9 by a San Francisco couple in their 40s is driving the internet wild. Even though their requirement might read as nothing out of the ordinary – a personal assistant – it is the details that make up for bizarre reading. The couple has listed their profession as biotech executives who lead extremely busy lives. So busy in fact, that they need a full time assistant, who would need to put in 40 hours per week to accomplish tasks such as cleaning up dog vomit and swim across the sea. Some of the problems that the couple seem to facing are: "resorting to unhealthy take-out and processed foods, personal social media accounts are neglected," buying "fresh flowers but don't have time to trim daily and change the water, indoor plants are dying...nail polish gets chipped and remains chipped, investment opportunities go un-researched, and that crucial'date night' consists of collapsing onto the sofa and watching a movie."

The marketing world is buzzing with talk of Artificial Intelligence and one of its friends, Machine Learning. The concept of what defines AI has changed over time, but at the core there has always been the idea of building machines which are capable of thinking like humans. These terms seemingly strike fear into the heart of many a marketer. Is AI just the latest buzzword? Do I actually need to understand it?