Chinese search giant Baidu has named former Microsoft business group head Qi Lu as its COO and group president. Until last September Lu was head of Microsoft's Applications and Services Group, where he managed products including Microsoft Office and Office 365, Bing search engine and Cortana personal assistant. At Baidu, Lu will be in charge of products, technology, sales, marketing and operations. A key strategic focus for the company over the next ten years will be artificial intelligence, Baidu chairman and CEO Robin Li said on Monday. Li is counting on Lu's leadership experience and knowledge of AI to help the company attract the necessary expertise to become a global leader in the field, he said.

It's only been a few months, but the Google Assistant has already become a reliable companion for me. The daily weather forecast, sports scores, news reports, and Google's ever-present smarts make it something that fits the test for what makes a good technology. You wonder how you lived without it. The presence of the Google Assistant in the Pixel and Google Home, however, brings into sharper focus the other side of that two-edged-sword of new tech. It makes you crave more.

You find yourself at your desk, hundreds of files have been imported into Lightroom as you start the process of editing your latest shoot. Clockwise," and just as quickly as you say your commands, Lightroom responds. No this isn't some pipe dream; a Siri-like intelligent assistant may be the future of Adobe. Our speech recognition system is able to directly accept natural user voice instructions for image editing either locally through on-device computing or through a cloud-based Natural Language understanding service. This is a first step towards a robust multimodal voice-based interface which allows our creative customers to search and edit images in an easy and engaging way using Adobe mobile applications.

A reminder of the person that you don't want to be as we move into 2017: In late 2014, I shared some of my thoughts regarding technologies that would shape our world between the years 2015-2020. One of the graphics that I created and shared talked about nine specific forces that would increasingly influence both our professional and personal lives. Located at the center of the diagram were three items: Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, and Machine Learning. I still believe that these items are properly situated in the center and that they will continue to dominate our conversations. If you, like millions of other people, received the Amazon Echo or Google Home this year during the holidays, you are starting to see the early promise and importance of all three of these technologies.

Cognitive computing is rapidly infusing every aspect of our lives. As 2017 approaches, the cognitive revolution--riding on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and data science -- is coming home to roost more rapidly than many realize. Here are my predictions for the many ways in which you may encounter cognitive technology. Most e-commerce applications now include in-line chatbots that pop out automatically and/or at your request to answer your questions, recommend products for you to purchase, and otherwise make your customer experience more seamless and satisfying. Behind the natural-language conversational interface are cognitive algorithms that are built and tuned by data scientists through real-world experiments, A/B tests, machine learning, and predictive analytics assets in line to merchants' applications.

The following post was first published in an earlier edition of Marketing Insider: Cross-Channel. Creating original branded content solves many problems for marketers, but also presents challenges -- among them distribution and realizing ROI from what can be a costly investment. Time Inc., CBS and Telepictures are among hundreds of publishers working with IRIS.TV, which recently introduced a product to manage the distribution of branded content. Its video personalization solution uses artificial intelligence and machine learning technology so publishers can automate the programming of their video libraries for the individual based on that person's preferences and behavior. We spoke with Rohan Castelino, director of business development and marketing with IRIS.TV, about how this works.

Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana and all the search algorithms out there today show that robots are often the first point of contact for marketers trying to reach customers. For those concerned about a robot takeover, remember that artificial intelligence (AI) can be a marketer's best friend. Robots, unlike people, are consistent. They are good at tracking and delivering high-quality results which save us time, money and effort. Robots ultimately answer to us, making them effective helpers upon which we can increasingly rely.

When Amazon first coined the strapline "Ask Alexa" for its virtual assistant, it couldn't have predicted the X-rated nature of some of the requests. "She" may boast an encyclopaedic knowledge, but research by consumer behaviour analysts Canvas8 reveals that some users are more interested in a virtual hook-up than fact finding. And she's not the only target: the equally smooth voice of Microsoft's Cortana is getting customers just as hot under the collar apparently. From perma-smiling avatars in traditionally female support roles, to hyper-sexualised "fembots" pandering to male fantasies, the female form is everywhere in techno-world - attractive, servile and at your command. A little more conservative, but just as eager to please, is virtual personal assistant Amy Ingram, the brainchild of New York start-up X.ai.

I can sift through millions of data points, analyze them using sophisticated analytics models and respond with answers in seconds! I'm also learning continuously to improve recommendations as we go along." This creates new users and unbelievably new usages for Analytics Maya's Causality Model uses Machine Learning and Neural networks to predict and explain cause and effect.

In September 2016, Google launched its new chat app Allo in India. The app's highlight was the Artifical Intelligence powered Google Assistant -- a conversational bot that could help perform tasks such setting reminders, searching for restaurants, booking movie tickets, sending a text to someone and much more. The main caveat was that the Assistant works only online. While it is quite obvious that one would not be able to get the latest movie shows or their favorite football team scores without the Internet, there are phone functions, such as reminders and calls, which can surely be handled by an AI bot without an Internet connection. While Google Now does support some functions offline, Google Assistant and Apple's Siri always asks for online support when you tap the button.