With marketing becoming taking a central role in many companies, CMOs are forced to think more strategic. While they wade through the thousands of martech and adtech software out there, they must also align with the board and line of business heads to ensure that their marketing strategies meet corporate goals. It has ushered a new interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help CMOs succeed. Such needs as created a frenzy among vendors to build the ultimate AI. Amazon, for example, recently announced three new AI tools – Lex, Polly, and Rekognition -- drawing on the character of the company's personal AI assistant Alexa. Together, they will help developers to create apps that consumers can have easy conversations with, seamlessly turn speech to text and vice versa, and allow a product to recognize face and objects (and identify who it is talking to).

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.

Google Pixel and Pixel XL have turned quite a few heads since it's released. The primary reason behind this are the set of features that it provides. Experts believe that the recently released Android device is the best android based smartphone ever manufactured till date. One of the most popular features is the new AI based Google Assistant. The assistant is also a part of Google's new messaging application Google Allo.

For anyone that hasn't been hiding under a rock for the last few years, it's become abundantly clear that the largest IT firms on the planet are moving quickly to build up their capabilities in artificial intelligence. But the largest of them all, Apple Inc., has been the least public about its plans. A revelation about a closed-door meeting in Europe suggests that might change. Given Apple's fondness for secrecy, that's probably not going to reverse overnight. But a recent article in Quartz has revealed some of what's going on under the AI covers in the $500 billion-plus company.

Aim is to build an ecosystem around the smart home device. Google wants to make its Assistant smarter so it is opening it up to third-party developers. The Google Assistant, which brings together technologies such as Knowledge Graph and Natural Language Processing, is to have its API made open so that the company can build an ecosystem of developers around it. This will hopefully mean that it will be able to connect to more apps and services, making it a more appealing system to customers. In October the company previewed Actions on Google, the developer platform for the Google Assistant, now developers will be able to build Conversation Actions for Google Home, the company's smart home speaker.

Two months after rolling out its digital assistant, Google is opening its doors to outside developers to help the company chase rivals, particularly Amazon.com On Thursday, the Alphabet Inc. unit launched a system for developers to build chatbots that work with Google Assistant, its voice-based virtual helper. The tools, called Conversation Actions, will let companies and other third parties interact with Google users by building bots that answer questions and, eventually, sell and book things through voice controls. Developers can seek approval for phrases that come after "Ok, Google" (the words that summon the Assistant) to launch the interactive bots. So, in the future if someone says, "Ok, Google, talk to Target," a chatbot for the retailer might appear and help the person buy things through a conversation, for example.

Google hopes making Google Assistant smarter will make its Google Home speaker more useful. Google Assistant is about to get a bit smarter, thanks to third-party developers. The Alphabet-owned company said Thursday it is opening up its digital assistant with new tools for developers who want to interact with customers through Google Home, its always-listening smart home speaker. The tools, called Conversation Actions, will allow developers to engage with users in conversational form to answer questions, provide assistance and eventually sell products and make bookings. Powered by artificial intelligence, the idea is for Google Assistant to learn about you and your behavior so it can provide answers catering specifically to you.

As consumers, we're familiar with -- if not yet wholly invested in -- the term "artificial intelligence," whether it's by way of self-driving cars or voice-enabled search like Siri and Amazon's Alexa. Artificial intelligence is on course to drastically change the enterprise, with big implications for productivity, and possibly even larger ramifications for the economy. Business intelligence is providing companies with an overabundance of data, but it's AI that's emerging to make this data actionable by giving executives and employees useful insights that are relevant to their specific roles and what they need to accomplish on any given day. To name just a few implications of how business will change with AI, today's workforce will be empowered to take on new approaches with time management, teamwork and collaboration, client service, and business forecasting. For example, instead of just assessing raw data, artificial intelligence can take into account historical patterns and the current context of an employee's role, the nature of the business within which they work, and market dynamics.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is now a reality, and want it or not, it soon will be part of our daily lives. In a recent study, Bank of America Merrill Lynch predicted that the artificial intelligence market will blossom to $153 billion over the next five years: $83 billion for robots and $70 billion for artificial intelligence-based systems. Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg believes that virtual robots powered by artificial intelligence are bound to transform the way companies interact with their customers. In a world where disruption has become the norm, super-intelligent machines have the potential to revolutionize businesses while benefiting users and society in general. But as these smart personal assistants blend into our environment, many questions arise.

IBM's supercomputer, Watson, has become the poster child for artificial intelligence (AI) in the age of big data. Opponent Ken Jennings' acknowledged the machine's huge potential when he said, "I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords". Today, as Watson forges new partnerships with major corporations like GM, providing cognitive computing solutions for businesses of all types, it has graduated to a new level. Through Watson's cognitive computing, IBM is the first to apply this intelligence to the workplace. There's been a huge amount of fear-mongering, propagating the idea that AI will replace human processes with automation -- making us redundant.