The highly contentious and arguably irresponsible comments from Alibaba founder Jack Ma around AI and its likelihood of creating athird World War– will have done little to inspire confidence in those that harbour fears around the subject of intelligent machines. For some, the two words placed together spark a sense of dread, trepidation or even fear. For others, it represents the beginning of an exciting new digital world with untold benefits and opportunities. Unfortunately, however, it's often the former,which seems to seep more into people's consciousness. It's perhaps then of little surprise that in recent survey by the British Science Association (BSA) that 36% of respondents believe that AI will eventually takeover or destroy humanity.

I'll examine each one – it'll be interesting to see what you think. Artificial intelligence, as a concept, has been around for a long time. From Hephaestus building the "fighting machines of the gods" to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, humans have thought about and created stories around our desire to replace the mighty gods with ourselves for several thousand years. We see it today with modern franchises like "The Terminator" and "The Matrix", and less recently with "2001: A Space Odyssey" and "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep/Blade Runner". AI is so popular and accessible as a concept in mainstream media that if you ask people what they think it is, they think they'll be able to answer.

How can artificial intelligence (AI) technology help you to sell? The old spray and pray method, reaching out to as many people as possible, is not working. Falon Fatemi, the CEO of Node.io, told Access AI, "80% of prospects are the wrong people, at the wrong companies, at the wrong time, and we're approaching them with the wrong message." She said that sales and marketing have, "a massive problem of businesses guessing at what their total addressable market (TAM) is and not knowing who the people and companies are they should sell their market into." "Every organisation has a different set of target customers", Falon told us, "and not only that but every sales rep has "Organisations need to really understand the people and companies that they should sell their market into with a high fidelity and level of integrity and data quality." "Then that data needs to be actionable, it needs to be real time, and it needs to be dynamic." Falon's AI company intends to make the 1:1 sales and marketing dream a reality by making sense of the plethora of data we have on the web. "We essentially build a model for every person", Falon said, "Our recommendations are not focused on generalised topics.

IBM was one of the first to bring voice search assistants into the travel experience with the launch of their Watson-enabled robot concierge, "Connie" in Hilton Hotels in 2016, but leaps in technology will see more and more travel apps and hardware integrating voice and natural language search into their user interfaces in 2018, sparked by the mainstream success of the Amazon Alexa. Consumers will be able to talk to their digital assistant, whether through their smartphone, Alexa or other device to check flight details, search for a hotel or book tickets immediately. The difference in adoption of voice search across different parts of the world is significant. Travelport's recent Digital Traveller research showed that while just 33% of consumers in the UK had used voice Search, 72% in China had. But in the US, the number of smartphone owners using voice assistants has doubled to more 60% in just 2 years.

What will be the key artificial intelligence and technology trends for IT in 2018? Business applications continue to churn out large volumes of data, and users are trying to mine that data to determine patterns and predict user behavior. In ecommerce, users want to know customers' buying patterns, which will help market products better. Website designers want to understand how visitors move through their sites in order to improve conversion rates. And companies want to analyze their sales data to correlate marketing dollars spent with sales dollars generated. Business intelligence and data analytics activities are becoming easier to perform, and that's driving their adoption in mainstream businesses that are seeking to make better, faster decisions.

For too long the thrust of AI has been to replace humans. For the last 30 years the media has loved to portray AI as meaning'Machines are better than Humans'; whether it's Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator or Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina. We think this has incorrectly framed the adoption of AI within businesses. It has set unrealistic expectations for how AI will perform, as well as created scaremongering about the large scale loss of jobs. A better framing is realizing that Machines and Humans have complementary capabilities.

The cyber security industry is a good example of a field where artificial intelligence (AI) is both being looked to as a near-magical perfect solution while also already being deployed in a practical way every day. But can we trust it? The cyber world is notoriously unbalanced, with the hostile attackers having their pick of thousands of vulnerabilities to launch their strikes, along with deploying an ever-increasing arsenal of tools to evade detection once they have breached a system. While they only have to be successful once, the security teams tasked with defending a system have to stop every attack, every time. The inhuman speed and power of an advanced AI would be able to tip these scales at last, levelling the playing field for the security practitioners who are constantly on the back foot.

Businesses who begin exploring artificial intelligence (AI) technology will soon become aware that an affordable and relatively easy solution exists for addressing specific problems: leveraging cloud-based AI. Instead of installing new software at considerable expense, or beginning the lengthy process of developing your own solution, today your company, or you as an individual, can access APIs readily made in the cloud to do your heavy lifting for you. It comes as no surprise that three of the big names in cloud-based AI are Google (Google Cloud), Amazon (AWS cloud), and Microsoft (Azure). They all offer AI platforms where you can access similar things: machine learning (ML) toolkits for your natural language processing (NLP), image recognition, and data crawling needs, as well as much more. It is a common difficulty when choosing between the product offerings of the big three tech giants: they all offer a similar service, and all of them appear to be of a high quality.

Business intelligence is a $16.9 billion industry providing opportunities to enhance every sector of online industry, but for a decade or more has provided nothing more than nice visualisations on charts. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data are some of the buzziest words in tech, and in 2017 BI companies will continue to incorporate these aspects into their offerings. There are three key trends that are currently occurring within AI in particular relation to business intelligence. We have reached a process of democratisation which means that anyone can have access to AI and use it within their business. Business intelligence and other AI tools are being built with an accessible interface that means you don't have to be a data scientist to use them.

Infosys, a global leader in technology services and consulting, is aiming to reinvent the way people consume sport using extensive player data. The Indian firm, which had revenues of $9.5 billion in its last financial year, demonstrated its'Infosys Information Platform (IIP)' during the recent ATP Tennis tournament in London, of which it was a headline sponsor. Speaking to Access AI, the firm's head of energy and services for Europe Mohamed Anis, who joined in 2000, said Infosys uses machine learning to analyse historical data on player performance, which in turn is able to predict behaviour, shot selection, and even a probabilistic outcome of the match itself. Anis (pictured) said the data is delivered in real time and can be used to help spectators view the game/match on an entirely different level – comparable to that of the coach. "Tennis has been around for a very long time," explained Anis.