With their rainbow of hues and myriad party tricks, color-tunable LEDs get all the press in the world of smart lighting. It's fun stuff, but the reality is that most of us will rarely find much of a need to turn all the lights in the house blue or red--unless it's time to celebrate our team winning the World Series. Even then, you'll probably want to turn them all back to white after the celebration. White light is also important in its own right, as today there is plenty of science to show how various shades of white--with variations in color temperature--impact our psychological state. Cool light that's closer to blue has an energizing effect, and is best in the morning.

US tech giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft are investing hundreds of millions of dollars into artificial intelligence as they look to make their platforms and personal assistants that it smarter. Part of this effort involves finding and hiring the brightest minds in the world. But with so many large companies involved in the so-called "AI race" it's not always easy to recruit the best talent. Yann LeCun, the director of Facebook AI Research and one of the world's most prominent AI academics, told Business Insider last week that he employs certain tactics to get people to come and work for him. "There's various things ... but a lot of it is nurturing relationships with academic laboratories that have a track record of producing interesting students," said LeCun, who is also a professor at New York University.

Who here remembers taking computer programming in school? Whether you learned programming by punching holes in a never ending series of cards, or by writing simple DOS or other computer language commands, the fact remained that computers needed an incredibly precise set of instructions to accomplish a task. The more complicated the task, the more complicated your instructions had to be. Machine learning is inherently different. Rather than telling a computer exactly how to solve a problem, the programmer instead tells it how to go about learning to solve the problem for itself.

AI -- looms on the horizon as the next game-changer for business operations, including sales. Salespeople tend to adopt technologies as consumers first and then expand use into their professional lives, so sales leaders thinking about AI will play may be focusing on assistive intelligence like Amazon Echo, Cortana and Siri. There is strong consumer demand: Strategy Analytics predicts that the use of voice-activated AI assistants will rise to almost 350 million by 2020. It's also easy to imagine the ways a voice-enabled assistant like Siri could become a great sales sidekick. Picture AI providing a spoken-worded guided selling system in CPQ, interacting with sales management systems while the salesperson is behind the wheel on a road trip, producing custom reports based on the salesperson's spoken requests and then displaying the results on a screen.

Companies worldwide will spend $3.5 trillion on IT in 2017, market research firm Gartner predicts. Above all else, companies are expected to increase their spending on software and services (as opposed to hardware), as they all rush to buy their tech via the cloud computing model, where tech is hosted in the vendor's data center and delivered as a service over the internet. Software spending is projected to be up 6 percent in 2016, and to grow another 7.2 percent in 2017 to a total of $357 billion. Meanwhile, companies will spend $943 billion on IT services, up nearly 5% over 2016 spending levels. All this means that there are billions of dollars at stake for the rising tech trends, things that emerged within that last few years are ready to take off and become mainstream next year.

Entering the hardware business is nothing unusual for an Internet giant like Google. But in launching its Pixel phone last week, Google GOOG is setting itself up to compete with its own direct customers. Unlike its previous Nexus smartphones, where most manufacturing and marketing is carried out by third parties--including Huawei, LG, and ASUS--the Pixel phone is completely Google's own creation. From design to development to branding to marketing, Google is behind it all. But what's peculiar is its determined pursuit in this less-profitable, asset-intensive side of business. Several studies, business academics, and consultants have shown the limits of asset builders, or companies that accumulate physical assets in order to market and distribute physical products.

Jason Mars is an African-American professor of computer science who also runs a tech start-up. When his company's artificially intelligent smartphone app talks, he said, it sounds "like a helpful, young Caucasian female." "There's a kind of pressure to conform to the prejudices of the world" when you are trying to make a consumer hit, he said. "It would be interesting to have a black guy talk, but we don't want to create friction, either. First we need to sell products." Mr. Mars's start-up is part of a growing high-tech field called conversational computing.

S. Somasegar is a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group and the former head of Microsoft's Developer Division. More posts by this contributor: Escaping the trough of disillusionment for virtual and augmented reality The intelligent app ecosystem (is more than just bots!) How to join the network Daniel Li is an investor with Madrona Venture Group. More posts by this contributor: The new paradigm for human-bot communication The intelligent app ecosystem (is more than just bots!) How to join the network You can hardly talk to a technology executive or developer today without talking about artificial intelligence, machine learning or bots. While everyone agrees on the importance of machine learning to their company and industry, few companies have adequate expertise to do what they wanted the technology to do. Here are some insights into what we can expect in the coming years around ML and AI.

One of the major announcements to come out of Microsoft's Build 2016 developer conference today was the bet the company is making on bots. Microsoft believes that bots are the new apps. Yesterday, they invited developers to build bots for Cortana, the company's virtual assistant. Cortana, for you non-gamers, is a virtual persona character from Microsoft's blockbuster first-person shooter Halo franchise. Microsoft is betting on the notion of "conversational computing," which is why the company is putting its voice recognizing virtual assistant front and center.

The use of recommender systems has exploded over the last decade, making personalized recommendations ubiquitous online. Most of the major companies, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Netflix, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo!, eBay, Pandora, Spotify, and many others use recommender systems (RS) within their services. These systems are used to recommend a whole range of items, including consumer products, movies, songs, friends, news articles, restaurants and various others. Recommender systems constitute a mission-critical technology in several companies. For example, Netflix reports that at least 75% of its downloads and rentals come from their RS, thus making it of strategic importance to the company.a