Welcome to the Age of AI-Based Super Assistants

In the 2013 movie Her, a virtual personal assistant named Samantha quickly evolves from merely competent to awesomely so. Rather than merely scheduling meetings, Samantha becomes a life coach, cajoling the main character, Theodore, a writer, to publish his letters and to move on with his divorce. That movie is science fiction, but those who are attuned to the rapid improvements in artificial intelligence say a version of Samantha (minus the later romantic attachment and singularity) is on the near horizon. For businesses, the promise of AI is that Samanthas will be embedded across all aspects of the organization. Such agents will analyze data, discover patterns over time and then make decisions based on predictive analysis.