This weapon will be powerful, versatile and indestructible. It will feel no pain. It will have only one purpose: to return to the present and prevent the future. This weapon will be called the Terminator. I love Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and everything that makes computers smarter.

It's your nighttime routine: You drop your phone onto the nightstand charging pad, and it asks about your day. You tell it, talking to the virtual personal assistant just like you'd talk to a friend. Your phone's artificial intelligence knows you almost as well as you know yourself (maybe even better). So when it suggests ways to get through tomorrow's calendar, you trust its advice. AI is practically everywhere, and getting smarter all the time.

Microsoft's next step in its quiet but highly visible infiltration of Android is the lock screen. The latest piece of beta software from Redmond allows users to access Cortana with a single swipe from the opening screen. It's quick and easy to use, it integrates into the Android environment on a smartphone and it increases the potential of users joining Microsoft's cloud. As I've previously noted on Forbes, the battle over the dominant mobile operating system and the alternative option has been decided. Google's flavor of Android has walked away with the volume prize, while Apple's iOS picks up the second place in the market share.

These days it seems like you can't open a newspaper (ok, web browser) without coming across an article on artificial intelligence. Well publicized breakthroughs like Google AlphaGo's unprecedented victories over human Go champions have heralded the promise of a new golden age for AI. Add to that the personification of personal assistants in Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa coupled with Salesforce's "resurrection" of Albert Einstein and the rampant proliferation of AI-related startups - and the AI buzz becomes more of a cacophonous clamor. To put it mildly, this is confusing for businesses, who are trying to determine what is real and what is mere snake oil. Will AI achieve its transformational promise, or will it join the trash heap of over-hyped technologies?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is making its way from science fiction to reality, in applications like self-driving cars, personal AI systems like Cortana, Siri, and Google Assistant, and home assistants like Amazon's Alexa and Google Home. AI is also under some pressure from people who fear its impact on society in terms of privacy and job security. A number of efforts are underway to both ensure that AI is developed with society's concerns in mind and to help assuage those concerns as more and more people are exposed to AI in their daily lives. Today, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke about a number of AI concerns during an interview at the DLD conference in Munich, as Bloomberg reports. Microsoft is, of course, one of the leaders in applying AI in real-life applications, and so far the company is focusing on how AI can help make us more productive.

Vizio's living room devices already play nicely with Google services, but wouldn't it be nice if you could use Google voice control as well? All of Vizio's SmartCast-equipped devices, including recent TVs, soundbars and speakers, just got support for Google Home. If you want to watch a movie on Netflix, you don't even have to wake your TV -- say the right words to Google's smart speaker and it'll start playing on your set. You can also pause, skip songs and tweak the volume without touching a button. If you're willing to buy Google Home, you're not dependent on busting out a phone or tablet to get the most out of Vizio's ecosystem.

Microsoft is looking to put Cortana front and center on Android, as a new update will add the AI assistant to your lockscreen. The update is currently in beta, so while it isn't available to all users yet, it should be arriving sometime in the next few weeks. Of course, if you're a beta tester for the Cortana app, you can get this extra functionality right now, but everyone else will have to wait. Cortana will function just like any other lockscreen shortcut. Once you allow it to take up residence there, you'll see a Cortana icon appear near the bottom.

The next BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer digital transformation case study highlights how high-performing big-data analysis powers an innovative artificial intelligence (AI)-based investment opportunity and evaluation tool. We'll learn how LogitBot in New York identifies, manages, and contextually categorizes truly massive and diverse data sources. By leveraging entity recognition APIs, LogitBot not only provides investment evaluations from across these data sets, it delivers the analysis as natural-language information directly into spreadsheets as the delivery endpoint. This is a prime example of how complex cloud-to core-to edge processes and benefits can be managed and exploited using the most responsive big-data APIs and services. To describe how a virtual assistant for targeting investment opportunities is being supported by cloud-based big-data services, we're joined by Mutisya Ndunda, Founder and CEO of LogitBot and Michael Bishop, CTO of LogicBot, in New York. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Gardner: Let's look at some of the trends driving your need to do what you're doing with AI and bots, bringing together data, and then delivering it in the format that people want most. Ndunda: LogitBot is all about trying to eliminate friction between people who have very high-value jobs and some of the more mundane things that could be automated by AI. Today, in finance, the industry, in general, searches for investment opportunities using techniques that have been around for over 30 years.

Over the past few years the CES trade show has become a familiar post-holidays pilgrimage for many of the country's biggest marketers. They see the event as a way to get a sneak peek at the latest tech gadgets and technologies that can help them engage with their customers. This year marketing executives from companies such as Coca-Cola, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Campbell Soup and PepsiCo Inc. made their way to Las Vegas for the gathering. The convention was jam-packed with everything from self-driving cars to robots that play chess to Procter & Gamble's air-freshener spray that can connect with Alphabet Inc.'s Nest home to automatically release pleasant scents in the home. But there was one category that seemed to especially win over marketers: virtual assistants.

These were all prime fields of growth and innovation in 2016 and we can expect these trends to continue into next year and probably far beyond. In truth 2017 is likely to be the year when many of these technologies hit the mainstream – rather than something only those companies with the largest corporate budgets and most tech-friendly executive teams. A strong growth in the availability of technology delivered "as-a-service" through cloud platforms, as well as hardware improvements in the form of affordable sensor and display technologies, should help to bring into reality the "democratization" of data-driven enterprise which has become fashionable to talk about this year. So here is a run-through of my key predictions for the next year. Organizations wanting to stay ahead of the curve will want to ensure they are exploring all of the opportunities indicated by these trends.