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"Ohhh, you've got a new collar? Good boy! Do you want to go for a walk? I should have been so embarrassed saying these words. I was talking to a dog, which obviously didn't understand what I was saying, and not surprisingly, gave no reply at all; yet I thought nothing of it, and the other people around me thought the interaction (such as it was) was perfectly normal. No one gave me a second glance.

Now is the time of the year when every marketer should well reflect on the achievements of 2016 and holistically examine what the New Year is going to mean for marketing, branding, and business. With this article I proceed with a good tradition by following-up on my previous and related articles for 2016, 2015, and 2014. As we all know, paying attention to what's on the horizon does offer valuable insights. Knowing the below-listed 16 marketing trends which I consider as highly relevant for 2017, should help you to build, expand, and keep strong brands. Although this should have been ingrained in every marketer s DNA for years, however, with all the data, tech, and buzzwords flying around, one of the biggest marketing challenges of 2017 will be to stay calm, focused, and to be obsessed with the only one that matters: Your customer! How to identify her, to reach her, to engage her, to make her purchase, to have her stay loyal, to make her to recommend you, and to have her even re-purchase more of your products in the future? There is a certain risk that (marketing) managers – more than ever – get confused and fall into the trap of mixing up data-driven insights with a real customer-centric business philosophy. Therefore successful companies and brands don t worship the data gods for the sake of it; instead they have a comprehensive and deeply rooted digital transformation strategy in place which is flanked by a crystal clear marketing action plan. Enhanced and lived by every employee of the organization and not only by a chief digital officer who very often is floating around the company in search for a home base.

Microsoft announced Friday that it has acquired the Canadian artificial intelligence (AI) startup Maluuba. The acquisition will help Microsoft develop artificial intelligence with improved language understanding and communication skills. Although it is yet to release an artificially intelligent voice assistant such as the Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, the company has, in recent years, been strengthening its AI capabilities. In September 2016, the company joined hands with Facebook, Google, Amazon and IBM to launch a nonprofit called the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, or the Partnership on AI for short, aimed at advancing understanding of AI for the general public. With the acquisition of Maluuba, Microsoft will have an edge in terms of natural language processing.

In what The New York Times is calling The Great AI Awakening and Forbes has dubbed The Year of AI, 2017 is shaping up to be obsessively focused on artificial intelligence, a field that has been around for awhile (remember playing checkers against a computer?) Because the technology has finally reached its tipping point, AI, and its close relative machine learning, have taken a variety of industries by storm, bringing self-driving Ubers to the streets of San Francisco (and then carting them away); robotic vacuum cleaners to dirty household floors; and natural language processing to chat bots and IVR communications. With AI already embedded into these industries, it's easy to find examples of how the technology is shaping fintech. Below are eight areas of fintech into which AI has made inroads. Each area is ranked and rated (out of 5 stars) based on how it is currently influenced by AI and based on AI's potential to add value. AI is already a standard tool in robo advisory.

THIS past Christmas, millions of people will have opened boxes containing gadgets with a rapidly improving ability to use human language. Amazon's Echo device, featuring a digital assistant called Alexa, is now present in over 5m homes. The Echo is a cylindrical desktop computer with no interface apart from voice. Ask Alexa for the weather, to play music, to order a taxi, to tell you about your commute or to tell a corny joke, and she will comply. The voice-driven digital assistants from America's computer giants (Google Assistant, Microsoft's Cortana and Apple's Siri) have also vastly improved.

The Amazon Echo and Echo Dot were the best-selling products across Amazon this year. We are on the cusp of an era where talking to machines will be as natural as talking to humans. With artificial assistants there is a pressure to provide an experience; to give the customer an interaction that is as both useful and emotionally satisfying as talking to a human. A question to ask: Is there an imperative to make AI communicate like we do or to be understood? Will we start to change how we speak to sound more like the AI?

Just because the constant acceleration of technology advancement has become cliché doesn't mean you're prepared. You may think that's OK because everyone is in the same boat, right? Some big companies are already way ahead. And the gap between you and the leaders is getting bigger every day. Moor Insights and Strategy analyst Karl Freund put it most succinctly in a Forbes post last week: "While the big social media and internet commerce companies now think of Machine Learning as an essential foundational tool, most enterprises still have no clue where to begin in their quest to get on board and use AI." Here's a tiny sample of what you should have read last week.

After decades of screen domination, technology companies, products and, indeed, the entire tech industry, are finally starting to pivot. The target of this refocused interest? After a slow and pretty rough start with Apple's Siri several years back, the idea of voice-controlled technology devices is beginning to take hold, thanks in large part to the success of Amazon's Echo and its Alexa personal assistant. The proliferation of Alexa-enabled devices at the recent Consumer Electronics Show put an exclamation point on that development. But as cool and interesting as accurate voice recognition and simple control may be, the real impact of voice-driven computing is significantly more profound.

We're seeing a big up-take in digital personal assistants in the consumer world and in 2017 we can expect that to push into enterprise organisations. For example, Microsoft is already planning to release a Cortana personal assistant in the first quarter that will support your business productivity. It'll do things like automatically organising your meetings for you or automatically responding to certain emails with relevant responses. This will evolve over the course of the year onto bigger, better integrated things. With the power of machine learning and neural networks sitting behind all this data collection we'll start to see systems dynamically change offering better results and predictions back to our businesses.