The industrial equipment on their ships have thousands of sensors that collect data in real time. As part of their digital transformation, the company's marine service unit, Carnival Maritime, wanted to explore how it might take advantage of this data to find opportunities for operational improvement. One of the areas they looked at was that of water consumption onboard their ship. This is a complex problem, as consumption patterns can vary widely. Passengers of different nationalities shower for different durations at different temperatures and times of the day, for instance, and there are numerous other variables that make such consumption challenging to predict.

The advent of certain technologies -- notably inexpensive high-speed internet, secure cloud storage, mobility solutions, and low-cost devices -- has allowed the fantastic possibilities of the past to become reality. One of the platforms that has been enabled is artificial intelligence. And AI's ability to process information, at high speeds and at scale, unleashes endless new opportunities and infinitely better management of processes, systems, networks, and information. In 2016, we use voice-recognition systems to turn on lamps, driverless cars are being trialed, and robot hotel receptionists work in Japan. In fact, every industry -- from health care to finance to travel to fashion -- is being affected by new AI technologies.

PHOENIX--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aspect Software, a global provider of fully-integrated consumer engagement, workforce optimization and self-service solutions, announced today that it is making its Aspect Mila personal assistant chatbot available on leading workforce collaboration and messaging platforms such as Slack, Microsoft Teams and Facebook Workplace. Announced last year, Mila provides contact center and enterprise employees with automated self-service functionality to view schedules, request time off or trade shifts with other employees. Mila simplifies day-to-day administrative challenges faced by thousands of employees in call centers and other large labor force employers while also reducing the oftentimes labor-intensive workload of schedule management. With plain, conversational language, Mila allows employees to easily ask for a day off or pick up a shift right from within Slack. Supervisors and managers no longer have to field the administrative requests from employees, leaving that instead to Aspect Mila and Aspect's Workforce Management solution.

Great advertisements have become a part of the Super Bowl experience over the years so there's always a lot of excitement to see which products companies will try to hawk during the game and in what manner will they try to capture viewers' attention. As you can probably imagine, an ad spot during the Super Bowl costs quite a lot, a 30-second spot goes for $5 million and Google is going to spend that much money to promote Google Home. On the surface, Google Home might look like just another connected speaker but it can do much more than that as it's powered by Google Assistant. It's a "Made by Google" product that highlights the company's ability to make great hardware on its own. The Google Super Bowl 51 ad comes after the company's absence from the big game in 2016. Google hasn't disclosed the details about its ad spot so we'll have to wait until Sunday to find out just how effectively it's going to use that $5 million ad spot to promote Google Home.

Having a personal assistant is often a signal that you're a member of the professional elite. The connotation is that only C-level executives and VPs are "worthy" of their own personal assistant handling their schedule.

Over the next four days, CES 2017 will be a gold mine for the hospitality industry, said Shawn DuBravac, chief economist of the Consumer Technology Association. "Hotels are one of the areas I think most ripe for innovation and for change," he said. "You have long-lived capital assets, hotels that last 50-60 years, but technology that's changing rapidly every single year." Wynn Las Vegas set the tone last month for the types of technology trends the industry might see going forward by announcing that all 4,748 guest rooms at Wynn Las Vegas and Encore will be equipped with Amazon Echo -- Amazon's artificial intelligence device -- by this summer. Speaking Wednesday on CES 2017 tech trends to a packed room of about 500 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, DuBravac said voice recognition and artificial intelligence will be a a recurring theme on the show floor.

Apple would be joining other technology companies in the group, including Amazon, Google, Facebook and Microsoft. Although an announcement is expected as soon as this week, neither Apple nor the partnership has issued any official comment on the move. In some ways, joining the consortium would be a logical step for the company. Apple has become a major player in AI technology in recent years with the development of Siri, its natural language personal assistant. On the other hand, Apple is famous for the secrecy it maintains surrounding its major initiatives, including AI. Until recently, Apple researchers working on AI were even discouraged from publishing their findings.

Today (January 30), Starbucks is taking the next step toward evolving the digital customer experience by launching voice ordering capabilities within the Starbucks mobile iOS app and the popular Amazon Alexa platform.

In this new episode of Real Smart Marketing, we've posed this big question to four of our favorite influencers. If you're like me, the first thing that comes to mind when you hear "AI" might be this: But as I've come to realize, what we're talking about is a lot less creepy. AI is changing the face of SEO, but not like that. We're talking about algorithms that enable machines to make connections, "learn" to process data, and apply its learning in future tasks. Basically, improvements in artificial intelligence like deep learning and natural language processing mean that search engines are becoming smarter and more human-friendly.

The year 2016 proved to be an important milestone in the history of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Though the researchers have been working on creating intelligent machines for long, the year 2016 witnessed the concept leaving the realm of science-fiction to become more tangible and realistic. The year began with the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announcing his plans to build an artificial assistant for his home. As the year proceeded, organisations across the globe started increasingly investing their resources towards the research and development of AI. As the word caught on pace, tech titans including Google, Intel and Apple raced to acquire private companies working to advance artificial intelligence.