A key part of insurance company Lemonade's pitch to investors and customers is its ability to disrupt the normally staid insurance industry with artificial intelligence. It touts friendly chatbots like AI Maya and AI Jim, which help customers sign up for policies for things like homeowners' or pet health insurance, and file claims through Lemonade's app. And it has raised hundreds of millions of dollars from public and private market investors, in large part by positioning itself as an AI-powered tool. Yet less than a year after its public market debut, the company, now valued at $5 billion, finds itself in the middle of a PR controversy related to the technology that underpins its services. On Twitter and in a blog post on Wednesday, Lemonade explained why it deleted what it called an "awful thread" of tweets it had posted on Monday. Those now-deleted tweets had said, among other things, that the company's AI analyzes the videos that users submit when they file insurance claims for signs of fraud, picking up "non-verbal cues that traditional insurers can't, since they don't use a digital claims process."

Big tech companies still love to tout artificial intelligence systems as an innovative solution to endemic human bias and racism... all despite numerous reports and extensive analysis repeatedly refuting its effectiveness. AI-driven insurance claims service, Lemonade, has apparently not seen any of this evidence to the contrary, however. In fact, the company has managed to make a recent social media snafu even worse by trying to walk back boasts of its AI's supposed ability to detect incriminating "non-verbal cues" and other possible indicators of fraud. In doing so, the insurer hasn't just enraged its users, it's directly contradicted its own SEC filings. And it's made it sound a lot like it's using AI for the insurance equivalent of phrenology.

Chatbots for a long time have existed to amuse, frustrate and at times entertain (albeit unintentionally). The term "ChatterBot" was originally coined by Michael Mauldin (creator of the first Verbot, Julia) in 1994 to describe conversational programs (thanks Wikipedia). From the lofty origins of Verbot, the humble chatbot has become a bit of a loner, the last bastion of customer support. This, of course, is a real shame and a glaring missed opportunity for companies who are looking to engage effectively with customers to provide some level of assistance for simple questions and tasks. With the technology in place to support chatbots (AI, machine learning and automation), evolving at a frenetic pace, the chatbot is rising from the ashes with a newly defined purpose.

It has been a stellar 12 months, and we're pumped to share the numbers and secrets behind what went down! Call it fate, or coincidence… On November 8, 2018, about 30 minutes before the devastating California Camp Fire was discovered, we launched something dramatic. We call it Project Watchtower, and it's our new eye in the sky. Watchtower uses machine learning to analyze signals coming from orbiting satellites to detect catastrophic events around the globe. We hooked our in-house bot, Cooper, to a raw data feed coming from NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer.

At Amazon's prototype grocery store, Amazon Go, customers can walk in, pick up what they want and walk out, without ever waiting in a checkout line or pulling out a wallet. Amazon will automatically charge their account and send them a receipt. Amazon Prime customers can place an order from their phone and get same-day delivery. These are the kinds of no-hassle experiences that consumers have come to expect -- and artificial intelligence (AI) is powering many of them. Amazon Go, for instance, uses computer vision, fusion sensors and deep learning to track when items are removed from or put back on shelves.