"If the old way [of investing] was pricey, stodgy and personality-driven, the new way is designed to be cheap, tech-centric and person-free," says reporter Samantha Sharf at Forbes. The new robo-driven investing was born out of the need to democratize investing by catering to the next generation with wealth... millennials. Studies show tomorrow's income earners have little faith in the current financial management industry. Their willingness to pay fees, as we've seen in their music and movie consumption, is minimal. No sizable savings, coupled with no great trust in advisors, staggering student debt, and a distaste for large fees, leaves the wealth management market open for disruption.

"We're on a journey here," says Forrester principal analyst Julie Ask. And what a strange, wonderful trip it is turning out to be. Marketers already dazed by the overnight emergence of almost 4,000 marketing technology companies and just starting to really take advantage of the mobile revolution are facing yet another disruption: AI, bots, and messaging platforms. Some of us are eagerly jumping on the bandwagon, as Facebook now has 11,000 bots that can help people order flowers, buy food, or fix an issue with their flight. But many marketers are still wondering how, why, where, and … what's the ROI?

Thanks to its ability to draw insights from huge and complex data sets at great speed, artificial intelligence (AI) is making the previously obscure into something measurable. It also offers the opportunity to create new experiences for consumers. But what does this mean in practice for marketers? Big data is nothing without equally big intelligence – that's true for people and for machines. It doesn't matter how much you know when you can't systematise and apply that knowledge to achieve something useful.

Amy is an artificial intelligence-powered personal assistant for scheduling meetings. Users can interact interact with her as they would to any other person – and Amy takes care of all the tedious email ping pong that comes along with scheduling a meeting. Users simply copy their virtual assistant of choice on email with up to four individuals they wish to schedule a meeting, then the assistant takes over and coordinates the schedules using natural language processing, providing an experience that is entirely seamless. The x.ai team rely on MongoDB, the operational database that powers Amy, to provide the speed and schema-flexibility they require to build the platform. As Matt Casey, CTO and a co-founder x.ai explains: "We didn't actually know what that data would look like, so with the schema-less databases, [it was] easy to change our schemas over time very quickly and try new things."

These are just some of the scenarios that Hollywood has dreamt up, which are giving artificial intelligence (AI) a bad name. We've even seen Stephen Hawking express his doubts about AI, saying: "Creating AI will be the biggest event in human history… it might also be the last." It seems that a notion has developed that robots and the AI behind them are out to get us. So how accurate is the glitz and glam of Hollywood, or indeed the doom and gloom of Professor Hawking? It's easy to get caught up in the apocalyptic view Hollywood presents, but the reality, as you would expect, is very different – AI actually offers many benefits.

There are just two weeks to go until Windows 10's Anniversary Update rolls out to a PC, tablet, or phone (don't laugh) near you. To help familiarize you with the big update here's another nice little feature included in the new version of Windows 10: photo reminders in Cortana. We recently touched on this in our coverage of the new Sticky Notes app, and its added Cortana smarts. When you use Sticky Notes to create a Cortana reminder it includes a snapshot of the note you created. Cortana in the Anniversary Update will also let you add any image you like to your reminders.

For instance, chatbots powered by AI are able to field and answer questions from customers on a variety of subjects, from generating recommendations on gift purchases to locating the nearest Chinese restaurant. As with other forms of automation, some have questioned whether AI will replace customer service reps and people in other types of customer-facing roles. But just as customers have increased their use of digital channels, agents aren't being replaced but instead are relied upon and trained to handle more complex interactions when customers want human assistance. We've only begun to scratch the surface for applying AI and machine learning to the customer experience. Self-driving cars that are powered by AI are moving closer to reality.

Slack's outstanding UX propelled the startup to unicorn status amidst a flurry of competitors, responsive design flourished and gave birth to a new era of mobile friendliness and device agnosticism, and the web as a whole experienced a shift in consciousness as sites became easier to use, apps became more intuitive to navigate, and services became all the more delightful and engaging to interact with. I am proud to say that the field has finally come of age and found itself. At long last, UX Evangelists, Digital Empaths, and Interaction Designers have risen to the highest echelons of the creative class to further the bleeding edge of technology, design, and user delight. With UX Evangelists like Tobias van Schneider, Jennifer Aldrich and Chase Buckley behind the wheel, we are steering towards a brighter future. A future where little big details bring about user delight at every corner, where device agnostic pixel perfection is the norm, and where simple day-to-day experiences engage, excite, and stimulate users in new and innovative ways. So where do you fit into all of this?

In order to differentiate themselves from Tinder, dating apps are now borrowing social and privacy features from another super-popular mobile service: Snapchat. On Tuesday, Coffee Meets Bagel optimized its user-experience to give women more control over their dating connections. On the same day, Zoosk launched Lively, a brand-new dating app that uses video profiles so you can get a more accurate portrayal of your potential dates. The Coffee Meets Bagel update is now available for both iOS and Android, and Lively is iOS-only for now. Coffee Meets Bagel was founded with the premise of sending you just one potential match (or a "bagel") every day at noon, and has since made 2.5 billion introductions.

Cortana is set to fly the friendly skies thanks to a new partnership between Microsoft and Boeing, bring the Microsoft intelligent assistant closer still to the domain of its namesake. Microsoft and Boeing announced a partnership today to move Boeing's suite of digital aviation offerings over to Azure, and the end result is that said servers are going to begin to get smarter, according to Microsoft. "Centralizing Boeing's digital aviation applications on Azure will allow Boeing to analyze a large set of data provided from multiple sources," a Microsoft spokesperson told TechCrunch via email, explaining how the partnership is set to make Boeing's offerings better for airlines that use them. "Boeing could use the Cortana Intelligence Suite to help airline operators more effectively manage inventory, more efficiently schedule pilots and cabin crews, or proactively schedule maintenance that might otherwise delay a flight based on the data intelligence they gather from the cloud." That means that first, this is a very early partnership – the focus here is on the potential to expedite certain tasks in the future.