Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an important and evolving concept that is having significant impact within the Customer Experience industry -- and it's a topic that is being talked about on a seemingly daily basis at this point. But is AI really ready for primetime in customer care? I spoke with Michael Johnston, Lead Inventive Scientist at Interactions, about frequently asked questions about AI and Machine Learning as they apply to customer care. Artificial Intelligence refers to the capability of a machine to imitate intelligent human behavior. Put another way, AI technologies are algorithms that attempt to mimic things that humans do.

With the adoption of Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, the Internet of Things (IoT) is already part of our home lives. Many of us also use a smart thermostat to monitor the temperature of our living rooms, and maybe even a smart doorbell to keep an eye on the front porch. What technologies do you think are likely to change the way people do business? I definitely believe embedding communications via WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) will be the next big thing for businesses, especially since it directly affects our rate of communication and in turn our rate of efficiency. Anything that will make life easier will affect our productivity and is going to be here to stay.

There has been no shortage of promises recently about how deeply the application of machine-driven artificial intelligence is expected to change our society in the next decade. Microsoft announced its ambition to conquer cancer using natural language processing to analyze research papers in close to real time. Google--now a self-proclaimed AI-first company--will make computers sound just like humans by applying machine learning to a vast corpus of human voice samples. Facebook is using AI to analyze satellite footage to locate all human life and fulfill its promise to bring the internet to the world's entire population. And the list goes on.

Over the past year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took on a new project: building a home artificial intelligence (AI) system. His AI assistant, Jarvis, who makes toast for his wife Priscilla and plays music for his daughter Max, is voiced by none other than actor and beekeeper Morgan Freeman. Zuckerberg's goal for 2016 was to create an AI system "to run my home and help me with my work." His project seems to have been quite a success: Jarvis responds to the Zuckerberg family's voice commands to perform actions like switching off lights, informing them of the day's schedule, and even entertaining baby Max with Mandarin lessons while her parents wake up. Zuckerberg captured the potential of AI in a Facebook note on the project: "AI is closer to being able to do more powerful things than most people expect – driving cars, curing diseases, discovering planets…" Zuckerberg asked the Internet who should voice his home AI, in a Facebook post, of course.

By all accounts, 2016 has been an extraordinary year for Silicon Valley. Not only have the technology behemoths mustered a growing influence on Capitol Hill, their sheer market capitalization also testifies to one undeniable fact: They are the ones who change the world. The tech industry's missions are unapologetic and filled with passion. Their corporate myths are often wrapped up in their early days as startups. That some awkward twenty-year-old could turn their social ineptness into their biggest advantage and build a global enterprise from their garage is the highest expression of the American dream.

The main difference between data analysis today, compared with a decade or two ago, is the way that we interact with it. Previously, the role of statistics was primarily to extend our mental models by discovering new correlations and causal rules. Today, we increasingly delegate parts of our reasoning processes to algorithmic models that live outside our mental models. In my next few posts, I plan to explore some of the issues that arise from this delegation and how ideas such as model interpretability can potentially address them. Throughout this series of posts, I will argue that while current research has barely scratched the surface of understanding the interaction between algorithmic and mental models, these issues will be much more important to the future of data analysis than the technical performance of the models themselves.

Virtually everywhere you look, Bay Area tech businesses are running into walls. Smartphones were revolutionary and lucrative, but the U.S. market is saturated, and Apple's iPhone sales have fallen for three quarters. The "app economy" has matured, with more people using existing apps than downloading new ones. And Facebook, which has filled users' news feeds with so many ads it can barely add more, is predicting its revenue growth will slump next year. Silicon Valley needs its next big thing, a focus for the concentrated brain power and innovation infrastructure that have made this region the world leader in transformative technology.

With the adoption of Apple's Siri and Amazon's Alexa, the Internet of Things (IoT) is already part of our home lives. Many of us also use a smart thermostat to monitor the temperature of our living rooms, and maybe even a smart doorbell to keep an eye on the front porch. What technologies do you think are likely to change the way people do business? I definitely believe embedding communications via WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) will be the next big thing for businesses, especially since it directly affects our rate of communication and in turn our rate of efficiency. Anything that will make life easier will affect our productivity and is going to be here to stay.

This week, Mark Zuckerberg published the results of his 2016 project -- building a real world Jarvis. This AI-based personal assistant gets commands from Zuck, and in turn, operates certain parts of his home. Here's a video he posted (with a special voice actor) showing Jarvis' functionalities. One of the things I immediately noticed about this diagram is that Jarvis gains most of his power from connecting through APIs. As you probably know, an API is an applied programming interface that allows one piece of software to talk to another.

Mark Zuckerberg has enlisted the help of Morgan Freeman and taken a shot at Nickelback while unveiling his new artificial intelligence assistant. The Facebook founder and CEO showed off "Jarvis" with a post on the project and videos on his Facebook page. The voice interactive assistant takes its name from a similar AI device in the "Iron Man" films. Zuckerberg can be seen in the videos using Jarvis to control lights, the thermostat and even make toast. It also plays music, but when asked by Zuckerberg to play some good songs by the much derided Canadian band, Nickelback, Jarvis replies: "There are no good Nickelback songs."