You're looking at your iPhone for a particular picture of your friend, taken a couple of years ago. There are thousands of images to search through, but the Apple Photo app zeroes in on the right person, and presto! Within seconds you find the picture you're looking for. There's a lot at work behind the scenes to make this happen, including facial recognition and image analysis and automatic tagging, coming together to save effort by making inferences about what's needed or wanted, and then acting on those inferences in real time. Companies like Apple -- and Google, FedEx, Uber, Netflix -- have spent years building systems and architectures that enable user experiences to become easier, more personal and more intuitive.