Artificial intelligence has played a role in customer service for some time now, but it's only recently that its full potential for transforming the customer experience has come to light. Conversational commerce is redefining the role of messaging apps in customer engagement, while self-service tools continue to simplify the customer service process and shift the role of human customer service agents in the contact center. Here are six ways artificial intelligence is reshaping customer experiences of both the present and the future. Big data is a key player in targeted marketing practices, offering brands important insights into customer behavior. Artificial intelligence technology may interpret big data to identify customer browsing patterns, purchase history, recent access to customer devices, and most visited webpages.

The "willing suspension of disbelief" is the idea that we (the audience, readers, viewers, content consumers) are willing to suspend judgment about the implausibility of the narrative for the quality of our own enjoyment. We do it all the time. Two-dimensional video on our screens is smaller than life and flat and not in real time, but we ignore those facts and immerse ourselves in the stories as if they were real. We have also learned the "conventions" of each medium. While we watch a movie or a video, we don't yell to the characters on the screen "Duck!" or "Look out!" when something is about to happen to them.

This post is authored by Scott Haynie, Senior Software Engineer, and Senja Filipi, Software Engineer, at Microsoft. Telemetry plays an important role when you operationalize new experiences/apps that span the web, mobile and IoT, including new gadgets such as the Microsoft HoloLens. The abundance of data that is made available can help developers monitor and track system health and usage patterns, and provide important new insights into how users interact with your application. Tapping into this wealth of information can really help you align your customers' experiences with their needs and expectations. At the Ignite 2016 Innovation Keynote, we showed the future of home improvement as envisioned by Lowe's and Microsoft.

Google Assistant and the smart speaker Google Home have some opinions on how to be a better person in 2017. Ask "What should my New Year's resolution be?" and the AI assistant will tell you to do things like write a novel or pick up calligraphy. Here are the five answers to the question Google Assistant gave VentureBeat when we asked earlier today. Nothing earth-shattering or controversial about this ability, but it's not a question Alexa or Siri attempt to answer. You could write a novel or keep a journal.

If you like our content, please sign up for our newsletter here. Thank you for supporting Last Week in the Future in 2016. This week's special New Years Edition will feature IoT & ML/AI highlights from 2016 and list trends to watch in 2017. In 2016, we saw the rise of voice UIs with the success of the Amazon Echo and the Google Home. We also experienced the AR/VR boom with Oculus Rift, HTC, PTC, and Microsoft all pushing more updates on their AR/VR headsets plus the explosive popularity of Pokemon Go.

Q: I got Amazon Echo for Christmas. It tells me the weather and plays music. What else can it do? It seems like a waste of money to me. A: At its core, Amazon's Echo is a Bluetooth speaker that responds to voice commands.

In February, I took a job designing the personality of a chatbot called Kai. I ghostwrite the lines it says, and I have thought, while testing it, that talking to myself has rarely been so unpredictable. Kai, which was conceived by my employer, Kasisto, to help customers with online banking, works over text message, Slack, and especially Facebook Messenger, where more than thirty-four thousand other chatbots have joined it since April, when Facebook opened the platform to developers. Many of these bots possess no personality. The ones created by CNN and the Wall Street Journal, for instance, greet first-time users with "we," as if the whole newsroom were on the other side of the screen, and run keyword searches rather than engaging in conversation.

If you prefer reading, here's the quick recap on what changes AI will bring to marketers according to these four industry influencers, plus some of my personal suggestions of what you should do in face of these changes: According to Sam Mallikarjunan, Head of Growth of HubSpot Labs, visual content will have an increasing influence on SEO, as he says, "search engines are getting good at knowing what a video, audio clip, or image is actually about." Not only does Google favor YouTube videos in search results, they're also getting better at analyzing what visual content is about. Just like how content writers had to learn to optimize headings and keywords, visual artists will have to start thinking about SEO when creating visual content like images and videos. SEO for videos, for example, means optimizing keyword targeting, descriptions, tags, video length, and more. Here's a great guide on optimizing videos for SEO from Brian Dean, if you want to learn more.

In celebration of our 5th anniversary, this month we're publishing a series of interviews with innovative leaders about what the next five years hold. To read more about this series, read our editor Nilay Patel's introduction here. Aaron Levie spends more time thinking about the future of work than most. When the 30-year-old entrepreneur co-founded Box, it was as a place for average people to store their files online -- Dropbox before there was Dropbox. But years ahead of Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, Levie saw that the real money in online storage was in the workplace -- and so the company turned to making products that let people collaborate at work.

It's the last day of 2016 and many of us are already planning a better 2017. And we are not alone on that. Many tech companies have plans to bring many and exciting technology trends. Some of them have already made an impact on 2016 and the new year might bring more features. Let's check the most noticeable technology trends for 2017.