As banking organisations, financial services providers and brands predict and plan for the way consumers will manage their money in the future, artificial intelligence (AI) is high on the business development strategy for 2016 and beyond. Gideon Hyde, co-founder of Market Gravity, proposition design consultancy, shares his thoughts on this emerging technology and explains how businesses can embrace AI to enhance their offerings, meet consumer demand for speed, personalisation and convenience, and launch new products and services to stand out in the competitive marketplace. Gideon Hyde is co-founder and CEO of Market Gravity, which has offices in London, Edinburgh and New York. It works with big businesses, including Boots, Barclaycard, HSBC, Aegon, Standard Life, RWE npower and The AA, to help them realise their innovation capabilities and release the start up within. AI is already around us and used everyday within payments, money management and for robo-advice, particularly in the area of intelligent digital assistants that handle regular customer service enquiries and tasks.

From driverless cars to virtual personal assistants - breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) technology could lead to a loss of jobs for humans. And humankind currently does not have the skills to compete, according to a new report. Government officials have called for a Commission on AI to be established in order to investigate the social, ethical and legal implications of the technology. They warn that if British workers don't acquire new skills, millions could lost their jobs to machines. While some expect rising unemployment as labour is substituted for AI-enabled robots and machines, others foresee a transformation in the type of employment available, says the report.

Over the past four years, readers have doubtlessly noticed quantum leaps in the quality of a wide range of everyday technologies. Most obviously, the speech-recognition functions on our smartphones work much better than they used to. When we use a voice command to call our spouses, we reach them now. We aren't connected to Amtrak or an angry ex. In fact, we are increasingly interacting with our computers by just talking to them, whether it's Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, or the many voice-responsive features of Google.

Ask Siri or Amazon Alexa to tell you a joke, and you'll probably get something a 10-year-old would scrunch her nose at. Google wants to change that. The company unveiled Google Home, its Amazon Echo-like home assistant, last week. According to the Wall Street Journal, Google hired writers from places like Pixar and the Onion to help spice up the Home's dialogue and give its AI more personality. Apparently there's more work to be done: As Tech Crunch points out, Google currently has a job listing for someone with "experience writing dialogue for plays/screenplays, fiction/interactive fiction, and/or comedy/entertainment." Personality can be hard to nail down in AI.

NEW YORK--"Alexa, take on Spotify and Apple Music." But Amazon on Wednesday launched Amazon Music Unlimited, an on-demand streaming service powered by the Alexa voice familiar to Echo owners, and a service primed to muscle in on an already congested streaming market for music. Amazon Music Unlimited debuts with a catalog of "tens of millions" of songs--Amazon won't reveal a precise number-- as well as curated playlists and personalized stations. That promises to makes it more of a viable competitor against Apple Music, Spotify and any number of other streaming services than the company's existing Amazon Prime Music service, which has a far more limited catalog of some two million songs and will remain available at no extra cost to Amazon Prime members. All too often when you request a song on Echo, Prime Music only plays a sample.

Alexa can already order you an Uber, control your smart home devices, and keep you company. She's about to learn much better DJ skills, save you six bucks a month on streaming music, and possibly even change the way you listen to music in your house. Amazon Music Unlimited, a beefed-up subscription service built to compete with the likes of Spotify and Apple Music, launches today. It's cheaper than those big-name services--for many users, at least--and it features clever voice control with the company's Echo speakers. If you're using Music Unlimited on an Amazon Echo, Tap, or Dot, the service only costs 4 a month. To use it on anything else--mobile devices, your computer, a Fire TV stick, or even Sonos speakers--the pricing falls more in line with Spotify or Apple Music.

Analysis There was a distinct whiff of the retro about Google's launch of its Pixel smartphone. Exclusives with selected large mobile operators; yet another attempt to create a unified Android experience; even the clear focus on Apple as the primary competition – all these should be issues of the past. "Premium is a very important category," Hiroshi Lockheimer, head of Android, said in an interview. "It's where Apple is also very strong. Is there room for another player there? This is the wrong target in a world where the new web experiences are being driven by Facebook rather than Apple. Of course, Apple has huge smartphone power, but that is starting to wane, and the way to weaken it further is not to copy tactics which go right back to the original iPhone, but to shift the terms of debate. Google's heavy focus on its virtual assistant software, the heart and soul of Pixel and other devices, may do that – at least it shows the search giant playing to its strengths and seeking to ...

Yet there are several important data points involved, and the Alexa assistant that runs on my Amazon Echo speaker doesn't know what to do. Using the Google Assistant bot on the new Google Allo messaging app, things are a little different. Google has spent the last 18 years parsing the data for search queries. One of the key differences between the Assistant and Alexa is that Google understands context.

The artificial intelligence (AI) component in these programs aims to make create a world in which everyone can have a virtual aide that gets to know them better with each interaction. Google is making a high-profile push into AI, with the internet titan's chief referring to it as a force for change as powerful as powerful as smartphones. Google Assistant software is being built into new Pixel handsets - aiming to outdo Apple's Siri - enabling users to organise and use information on the devices and in the cloud - to check emails, stay up to date on calendar appointments, news or ask for traffic and weather data. Google also offers AI through its Allo messaging application which can be installed on smartphones, and its Google Home hub, a standalone device similar to Amazon's Echo which responds to voice commands to manage tasks and fetch information where people live. The South Korean electronics giant moved to jumpstart its AI efforts by purchasing the US startup Viv Labs, launched by the creators of Apple's Siri.

Google just debuted a digital assistant, which it hopes to place inside smartphones, watches, cars and every other imaginable internet-connected device. It's already hit a snag. The Alphabet Inc. division launched new smartphones last week with the artificially intelligent assistant deeply embedded. It also rolled out a speaker with the feature at its core and announced plans to let other companies tie their apps and services to the assistant. A day later, Samsung Electronics Co., one of the largest manufacturers of smartphones and other consumer devices, said it was acquiring Viv Labs, a startup building its own AI voice-based assistant.