While AI is having significant impact with the consumer market -- witness the explosion of AI-driven bots and digital assistants -- businesses are realizing the important ways they can take advantage of AI. One of the biggest areas of growth is in AI Marketing (AIM). Start with the fact that computers are great at crunching numbers, quickly providing results from complex math formulas, and handling repetitive tasks without complaint. Add in software that uses well-designed machine-learning algorithms, and you have the potential of a powerful AIM process to deliver detailed analytics and offer valuable insights. AIM software will revolutionize the role of the marketer -- for the better.

The internet strongly agrees there's an artificial intelligence (AI) revolution going on, and it's come to pharma marketing. IBM Watson, the AI brain being infused all over healthcare, will form the backend of an interactive display ad for GSK Consumer Healthcare's Theraflu. The cold-and-flu product was one of seven brands, across four beta partners, to sign on with Watson Ads, an initiative announced this past summer by the Weather Co. -- an IBM property -- aiming to develop a new wave of ads that people will be able to communicate with. According to the firm, it marks the first consumer use of IBM's cognitive technology for advertising. "This is a whole new foray into marketing," says D. J. Reali, SVP, national ad sales for the Weather Co.

The thought of handing important parts of your business over to artificial intelligence can seem rather scary and alarming, but many businesses are discovering that it's not as challenging as they first believed. In fact, A.I. technology is allowing thousands of businesses to save the one thing they can't get back: time. When people look back at the span of time between 2015 and 2020, they'll likely recognize this window as an important catalyst in the technological revolution that bred powerful applications that would transform life for years to come. At the heart of this revolution is A.I. And while products of A.I. are finally coming to fruition, it's not exactly a brand-new idea.

We are entering the age of the CUI, the conversational user interface. Already, there are 8.2 million voice-first devices in homes, mostly Amazon Echos. By the end of this year, that number will balloon to 33 million. That's the prediction from VoiceLabs, a startup that helps companies monitor and measure people's interaction with their Alexa Skills or Google Actions. Skills and actions are integration points between Alexa or Google Assistant and your technology; they are the conversational user interface equivalent of apps on Android or iOS smartphones.

Do you wonder how Internet of Things Will Affect Your Social Media Strategy? What part does Artificial Intelligence and Technology Play in Social Media? It all may sound like a sci-fi movie at first, but this is real life. New technologies are shaping the world we live in and at a rapid pace. Here's a quick guide to help you understand some of these emerging technologies and how they will affect social media.

Two summers ago, Magna International Inc. and Royal Bank of Canada brought together some of Canada's brightest entrepreneurs and innovators to brainstorm what Canada needs to foster the development of emerging technologies and tech companies. Fast forward to today and we are on the cusp of the next great technological revolution, driven by artificial intelligence (AI). The term may conjure up visions of science-fiction movies with apocalyptic outcomes, but the reality is we are already living in a world infused with AI, from music and movie recommendation services, to driver assistance systems in cars, to virtual personal assistants in our phone or in our home. Over the past few years, the pace of technological innovation and exploration of AI has increased exponentially, with futuristic ideas such as self-driving cars becoming tangible products of today. At the recently concluded World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, one of the major themes centred on AI as the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Artificial Intelligence has another champion and watchdog. Four months after its formation, the Partnership on AI, a group dedicated to tackling AI opportunities and challenges finally, officially welcomed Apple as a member. Tom Gruber, Apple's head of advanced development for Apple's digital assistant, Siri, joined the Partnership on AI's board of Trustees on Friday. Gruber joins science, research and AI leaders from a disparate group of companies including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM and DeepMind (part of Google), along with leaders from the ACLU, UC Berkeley and the Association for the Advancement of AI. "We're glad to see the industry engaging on some of the larger opportunities and concerns created with the advance of machine learning and AI. We believe it's beneficial to Apple, our customers, and the industry to play an active role in its development and look forward to collaborating with the group to help drive discussion on how to advance AI while protecting the privacy and security of consumers." said Gruber on the Partnership on AI site.

Machine learning is a mechanism to provide popular functionality like recommendation engines, predictive maintenance, and is a cornerstone of future IoT workflows. Cloudera customers are delivering strategic functionality with machine learning at its core. As an example, a popular dating site Zoosk uses Cloudera Enterprise for creating successful matches and reduce user churn using big data and machine learning. MMO gaming company Wargaming uses machine learning on Cloudera to elevate customer experience and engage users in advanced gameplay. And one of America's leading financial services companies Transamerica uses Cloudera to test and validate data models at a much faster scale.

Apple is joining fellow tech giants Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and IBM as the sixth founding member of the recently-formed artificial intelligence research group - the Partnership on AI. The non-profit said Apple has been "involved and collaborating with the Partnership since before it was announced" in September and is "thrilled to formalize its membership." "We glad to see the industry engaging on some of the larger opportunities and concerns created with the advance of machine learning and AI," Tom Gruber, Apple's head of development for its intelligence personal assistant Siri, said in a statement on the Partnership's website. "We believe it's beneficial to Apple, our customers, and the industry to play an active role in its development and look forward to collaborating with the group to help drive discussion on how to advance AI while protecting the privacy and security of consumers." The Partnership also announced that six new non-industry trustees will be joining its board including Jason Furman, former top economic adviser for Barack Obama; Carol Rose, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts and Subbarao Kambhampati, president of the Association for the Advancement of AI.

The next version of Apple's mobile platform will include an opt-in for iOS users to share their iCloud data in order to help the company improve software products, such as its voice-powered virtual assistant, Siri. The iOS 10.3 beta was released earlier this week. A note about the forthcoming change, under the heading "iCloud Analytics & Privacy", says any user data shared with Apple via this opt in will undergo "privacy preserving techniques" -- continuing its privacy-first approach to stepping up its AI efforts. One of the most interesting changes in 10.3 – Apple will use differential privacy on iCloud user data to improve services (opt-in) pic.twitter.com/NKqrTee8Fq The company has generally lagged behind data-mining rivals such as Google in developing machine learning powered technologies and embedding them into its software and services to offer a more personalized and/or predictive experience, in no small part because it has prioritized (and championed) user privacy -- meaning, unlike its major rivals, Apple does not routinely suck up users' personal data in the clear.