Last week I attended IBM (IBM) World of Watson as both a speaker and an attendee, and today as I sit in my neighborhood Starbucks (SBUX) thinking about everything, all I can say is WOW! This was one of the most interesting, inspiring and amazing events I have ever attended. And we are still in the very early stages of Watson, Cognitive and AI. I invite you to follow me as I learn more and write more about the wonderful world of Watson, all the companies that work with it and how it will change our industries, our businesses and our lives. As a wireless analyst and columnist, I come at this world of Watson from the wireless, telecom, internet and television angle.

For most people, it is not easy to picture the buying and selling of cognitive capabilities that have traditionally been embedded in humans – things like judgment and decision-making. Yet, thanks to recent advances in machine learning, we face the very real possibility of precisely such a'market for intelligence'. Given the potential of this market to transform the entire global economy, we must all begin preparing – now – for its emergence. To be clear, machine intelligence is still in its infancy, and while some of the current applications are remarkable, none are transformational. For example, the recommendation engines employed by companies such as Amazon and Netflix – which learn our preferences and recommend which books we should buy or which movies we should watch – are a common application of machine learning.

Would you go on a business date at work? Would you think I was weird if I told you I did? Some apps are making this possible, so I decided to try it out. As a family man who has just entered his 40s, I am not going to be arranging romantic liaisons on my smartphone. But maybe I haven't completely missed the boat when it comes to the thrill of swiping, matching and meeting up with strangers. Shapr is an app that works like the dating app Tinder, but it's for making business connections rather than romantic ones.

When the world shifted from desktop to smartphones, one thing didn't change: the existence of a screen on both devices. The screen shrank, but it remained the medium through which we interact with computers. For Google, that meant its core online advertising business -- visible search ads on a webpage -- remained intact and lucrative. Today, Google may be at the beginning of a new shift -- one toward artificially intelligent virtual assistants, in which we use our voice to interact with technology instead of our eyes. The problem with voice assistants is they don't have a screen on which to display ads.

I recently found a great new service on Product Hunt. My new PA is an artificial intelligence (AI) application – Amy – and she's insanely clever. Let me show you how to save hours on scheduling using this service, and then I'll ask you a question about how AI should be applied to planning. I would love to hear your feedback. Below is the test email exchange between my new AI personal assistant (Amy) and myself, as well as a couple of my internal colleagues (Nick and Brett), to set up a meeting that is good for the three of us.

Intel Corp. (NASDAQ:INTC) is set on dominating markets that are bound to become massive cash mines in the future. There is significant growth expected from its Data Center business. The company recently announced it would dedicate $250 million to the development of self-driving car systems. The chip maker is also gunning to secure a stronghold in the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology. Analysts are confident about Intel's capacity to rake in the IoT segment in the process.

Mention artificial intelligence and a discussion about the robot wipeout of humankind is sure to follow. It's a technology as strongly associated with creation as it is with destruction. It's also a technology that businesses will increasingly trust in decision-making, Gartner analysts said Monday at the research firm's annual Symposium/ITxpo here. In the next three to five years, Gartner predicts that 50 percent of all analytical interactions will be delivered via artificial intelligence, and many of the insights will be gleaned through verbal interactions. People already know and interact with A.I. systems through IBM's Watson, IPSoft's Amelia, Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana and Google Assistant.

Nintendo Reports Second Quarter Losses But 3DS Sales Are Up Thanks To'Pokmon GO' Increasingly, the world is becoming an intelligent, digitally enabled mesh of people, things and services. Technology will be embedded in everything in the digital business of the future, and ordinary people will experience a digitally-enabled world where the lines between what is real and what is digital blur. Rich digital services will be delivered to everything, and intelligence will be embedded in everything behind the scenes. We call this mesh of people, devices, content and services the intelligent digital mesh, and this forms the basis for our Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2017. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning have reached a critical tipping point and will increasingly augment and extend virtually every technology enabled service, thing or application.

Google Keep is probably the best Google service that most people don't use. Services like Keep, Evernote and Microsoft OneNote are often called "note-taking apps." They've grown beyond their roots, now offering collaborative workflow, reminders, checklists, geofencing, optical character recognition, voice transcription, sketching and more. A few years ago, I would have recommended Evernote. But over the summer, Evernote took a wrong turn.

However, smartphone AI has gone above and beyond Siri's initial features. Cortana from Windows can let us know the weather and remind us of important dates that are coming up, while Google's personal assistant will integrate with Google Home and Apollo so you have a one-stop assistant for all your personal and business needs. The Yahoo Tech journalists compared Siri vs Cortana, Google Now, and Alexa to find out which voice assistant is better. They found out that Siri (iPhone) and Google Now (Android) are the only assistants that flawlessly handle requests like "Remind me to pick up my dry cleaning when I leave home" or "Remind me to wear red on Valentine's Day". And only Siri executes such spoken instructions as "Make the screen brighter" or "Learn how to pronounce "Jacquee."