A mobile-first world? It's all about AI now

"AI is the new mobile" is a phrase we might as well start getting used to hearing. It's infuriating that, just as the marketing world finally starts to think "mobile first", not one but two technology giants signal loudly that they're over mobile and on to the next thing. Witness Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, who recently spoke about moving from a mobilefirst to an AI-first world. Make no mistake, he sees artificial intelligence as the future of search, best exemplified by what Google calls the Google assistant: less a product and more an artificially intelligent, conversational interface to all things Google. Earlier in the year, at Facebook's developer conference F8, Mark Zuckerberg made AI one of the three pillars of Facebook's ten-year roadmap (alongside – yes, you guessed it – connectivity and virtual reality).