Increasingly, the world is becoming an intelligent, digitally enabled mesh of people, things and services. Technology will be embedded in everything in the digital business of the future, and ordinary people will experience a digitally-enabled world where the lines between what is real and what is digital blur. Rich digital services will be delivered to everything, and intelligence will be embedded in everything behind the scenes. We call this mesh of people, devices, content and services the intelligent digital mesh, and this forms the basis for our Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2017. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning have reached a critical tipping point and will increasingly augment and extend virtually every technology enabled service, thing or application.

Artificial intelligence, popularly referred to as AI, is no longer seen only in movies and TV series. Many of us are already taking advantage of it through mobile apps and smartphones. AI specifically refers to the enhanced ability that a piece of software may have, where it can understand specific information, add contextual knowledge to it and suggest responses based on that. For example, the suggestion about which content to view on YouTube has an element of AI working in the background. Available by default in many Android smartphones, Google Photos uses AI and machine learning to identify objects or human faces in a photo and club ones with common elements and the same faces into specific folders without the user's intervention.

It's no wonder titans of tech are locked in an epic battle of the bots, racing furiously to produce the best virtual assistant. Thanks to the sudden acceleration of artificial intelligence and advancements in speech recognition and big-data storage, the technology behind virtual assistants is rapidly spreading from phones to cars and homes, and the truly useful helper is approaching fast. The four giants are fighting for the biggest share of a market expected to grow to $12 billion by 2024. "There's a tremendous amount of promise for these agents to help and assist with many different tasks that we face every day," said Ross Rubin, principal analyst at Reticle Research. "The more the agent can help you with, the more value it holds."

We made it to Friday. Some poor soul got their hands on Nintendo's new console two weeks in advance -- but has no games to play on it, Apple is tinkering with a 4K TV box. Oh, and if you'd like some bedtime reading, may I suggest Mark Zuckerberg's lengthy treatise on the future of Facebook? At least one retailer accidentally shipped Nintendo's next console two weeks early.A new Nintendo console... but nothing to play One eager Nintendo Switch buyer saw his new console arrived two weeks ahead of schedule, Unfortunately, he has absolutely nothing to play on it. "I have no games at all," he told the popular gaming forum NeoGAF.

With Amazon, Facebook and Google all adopting an open source approach to development of their artificial intelligence (AI) services, what could this innovation mean for a family shopping on the High Street? An end to Saturday morning parking mayhem – having to spend half an hour queuing to get into a shopping centre car park only to find out the only spaces left are on the hundredth floor can be a miserable start (and end) to a Saturday shop for the whole family. An AI personal assistant could reduce the friction of this inconvenience by reserving a suitable car parking space at the shopping centre in advance, based on the family's store preferences, accessibility requirements and other factors, like forecast weather. It can then send the reserved space location to the family's in-car GPS and automatically pay for its ticket. The more an AI can effectively integrate or communicate with other systems the greater the convenience for customers.

Comedian Romina Puma who has muscular dystrophy and uses a wheelchair, asks whether she should mention her disability when online dating.

Even as Siri and Alexa slip quietly into the flow of our lives and we watch IBM's Watson play Jeopardy! Marketers play on this to draw attention, declaring in intentionally stark blog posts that "AI is better than humans" and it "really is going to take people's jobs." We can speculate, we can worry, we can ponder the defeat of humanity in the face of AI, but that focuses on provocative possibilities, not the reality. To understand the potential for machine learning, we must stop obsessing about the forest and sharpen our focus on the trees. On a macro level, there's no doubt that machine learning will reduce the need for manual labor across many industries and roles, including the maintenance aspects of IT.

But how do you separate hype from reality? How can your company apply AI to solve real business problems in 2017? In September 2016, Luminary Labs convened 30 executives in healthcare, machine learning, and analytics for a grounded discussion on these questions with machine learning expert Hilary Mason, founder and CEO of Fast Forward Labs, and Sandy Allerheiligen, VP of data science and predictive and economic modeling at Merck. Here's a synopsis of what we discussed, and what AI learnings your business should keep in mind for 2017. AI and the Near Term 3 We've all seen the sensational headlines: The robots are coming, and they'll take our jobs! AI can do your job faster and more accurately than you can!

Amazon was the first to introduce a voice-powered assistant housed in a speaker, but Google wasn't far behind with Google Home. Now the search giant is giving its device the ability to buy products with nothing more than a voice command, just like Amazon. For Google, the aim is to make it easy to order everyday products from its Google Home speaker in an effort to engrain the device into people's daily routines--and take aim at one of the defining features of Amazon devices like the Echo and Dot, powered by the company's Alexa voice assistant. Google Home purchases will be available through retailers participating in Google Express, the company's same-day and overnight delivery shopping service--though some areas will only have two- or three-day shipping options available to them. Google currently counts companies like Costco, Whole Foods Market, Walgreens, PetSmart and Bed Bath and Beyond as partners and has more than 50 other national and locally retailers on board.

The world has already fallen in love with AI home assistants like Amazon's Alexa and Google's Assistant. Anyone who's used a device like Amazon's Echo or Google's Home smart speakers--the physical embodiments of the Alexa and Assistant software--knows that the experience is compelling. Asking for a specific song over dinner, switching off a smart bulb on the way to bed, or setting a timer while cooking all make life just that little bit more pleasant. Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that Morgan Stanley estimates that Amazon has sold 11 million Alexa devices. But anyone who's spent months living with an AI voice assistant will also know that they have limitations, too.