We're pretty much half way through the year, which means it's Computex time. As usual, you'll find a handful of us running around the Taipei show floors next week, where we'll be getting our hands dirty with the latest PC products and components. Last year was relatively fruitful thanks to the VR explosion. Several PC brands rolled out high-end GPUs or affordable ones capable of running VR. Even Intel surprised its hardcore users with its first-ever 10-core desktop CPU.

Artificial intelligence has begun seeping its way into every tech product and service. Now, companies are changing the underlying hardware to accommodate this shift. Apple is the latest company creating a dedicated AI processing chip to speed up the AI algorithms and save battery life on its devices, according to Bloomberg. The Bloomberg report said the chip is internally known as the Apple Neural Engine and will be used to assist devices for facial and speech recognition tasks. The latest iPhone 7 runs some of its AI tasks (mostly related to photographer) using the image signal processor and the graphics processing unit integrated on its A10 Fusion chip.

He is also the main author of H2O's Deep Learning. Before joining H2O, Arno was a founding Senior MTS at Skytree where he designed and implemented high-performance machine learning algorithms. He has over a decade of experience in HPC with C /MPI and had access to the world's largest supercomputers as a Staff Scientist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory where he participated in US DOE scientific computing initiatives and collaborated with CERN on next-generation particle accelerators. Arno holds a PhD and Masters summa cum laude in Physics from ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He has authored dozens of scientific papers and is a sought-after conference speaker.

Apple Inc. got an early start in artificial intelligence software with the 2011 introduction of Siri, a tool that lets users operate their smartphones with voice commands. Now the electronics giant is bringing artificial intelligence to chips. Apple is working on a processor devoted specifically to AI-related tasks, according to a person familiar with the matter. The chip, known internally as the Apple Neural Engine, would improve the way the company's devices handle tasks that would otherwise require human intelligence -- such as facial recognition and speech recognition, said the person, who requested anonymity discussing a product that hasn't been made public. Engineers at Apple are racing to catch their peers at Amazon.com Inc. and Alphabet Inc. in the booming field of artificial intelligence. While Siri gave Apple an early advantage in voice-recognition, competitors have since been more aggressive in deploying AI across their product lines, including Amazon's Echo and Google's Home digital assistants.

Robots are great at doing things they've been shown how to do, but when presented with a novel problem, such as an unfamiliar shape that needs to be gripped, they tend to choke. AI is helping there in the form of systems like Dex-Net, which uses deep learning to let a robotic arm improvise an effective grip for objects it's never seen before. The basic idea behind the system is rather like how we figure out how to pick things up. You see an object, understand its shape and compare it to other objects you've picked up in the past, then use that information to choose the best way to grab it. Dex-Net doesn't have the advantage of being a living person with eyes and a memory, so its creators gave it more than six million artificial 3D representations of objects and had it work out the best way, theoretically, to pick up each.

IT departments are currently plagued by gaps between data collection, insights and action. They constantly find themselves hand-holding non-technical teams like marketing, sales and HR. And often times, they have a limited number of information sources at their disposal. That is, if they haven't empowered their company with cognitive technologies. Many business leaders already understand that cognitive computing is going to be a major disrupter.

We've met with hundreds of Fortune 500/ Global 2000 companies, startups, and government agencies asking: "How do I get started with artificial intelligence?" While there are many excellent tutorials out there that show how to use TensorFlow or the beautiful math behind neural network training, we couldn't find a broad overview -- a "Chapter 0", if you will -- for product managers, line of business leaders, strategists, policymakers, non-AI developers to read first before moving on to more technical materials. So building on our popular primer on artificial intelligence, today we've launched a microsite to help newcomers -- both non-technical and technical -- begin exploring what's possible with AI. The site is designed as a resource for anyone asking the two questions above, complete with examples and sample code to help get started; no computer science degree required! Ultimately, it's aimed at people who aren't only studying AI in universities or labs and just want to get their hands and heads around it as they explore options for their own companies. Along those lines, I've also published a new presentation about the promise of AI, beyond the hype.

In case you missed it, the concept for Amazon Go is pretty simple. It's a grocery store where a shopper walks in, scans their smartphone as they enter, picks up their groceries, and walks out, completely skipping the payment process. Currently only available for employee beta testing, Amazon Go's first location is a small premises in Seattle but stores could spread like wildfire if the company iron out rumored technology teething problems. While they are currently cagey about details (we asked for an interview), the Wall Street Journal reports that the system in their first store can only handle 20 test shoppers at a time. To truly dominate the grocery market, size and choice matters, which means Amazon Go's current model could hamper mainstream adoption.

UPS (NYSE:UPS) on Monday said it has integrated its customer-facing chatbot with UPS My Choice, allowing customers to obtain information about their incoming packages and recent deliveries without providing a tracking number. UPS is the first U.S. package delivery company to offer a chatbot experience specifically designed for authenticated users. The chatbot enables a customer to log in to their UPS My Choice Account. It then can provide customized information, including package location and delivery detail – all without a tracking number. The chatbot initially helped users find UPS locations, get shipping rates and track packages.

This past Monday, our team had a chance to visit The Inbounder 2017 conference in New York City. The event featured great speakers, valuable takeaways, and an awesome after-hours event sponsored by SEMRush. I could probably go on and on about the sheer variety of information covered in the single-day conference; for instance, Melanie Deziel had a great speech about branded content that I'd love to dissect, Ricardo Tayar discussed how his team measured stress levels on test subjects to determine design effectiveness, and Rand Fishkin dropped a wealth of great tools on the audience that I will be making use of in the near future. But, even with all of that, the day still belonged to the machines and one thing is for sure, the machines aren't coming, they're already here. It's happening right under our eyes, and some of us haven't got a clue as to what they are, who's making them, and what it means for the future of marketing.