Keith Peiris says he started to see the generative AI writing on the wall six months ago. Peiris is the cofounder and chief executive of Tome, a San Francisco startup that makes presentation software juiced with generative AI. The company launched its product in early 2022 with a healthy cushion of 32 million in venture capital funding, and successfully surfed the ChatGPT hype wave after that, raising even more funding in early 2023. Venture capitalist and LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, former Google CEO and chairman Eric Schmidt, and Stability.ai's Tome had one problem, though: It wasn't generating meaningful revenue.

The problem in the future is that it will take too long. Back in 2006, Java founder and lead designer James Gosling declares, "The cell phone is tomorrow's desktop." Despite the proliferation of mobile phones, vendors shipped 71.6 million desktops and laptops in the last quarter. I wish they didn't exist. Last week I had to take a vacation because of an unscheduled time spent repairing my neighbor's virus-laden Windows laptop. I can't wait for Gossling to answer correctly, but that day hasn't come yet.

Robotic process automation (RPA) company UiPath may debut its own platform for creating AI agents or bots both for customer-facing services and to carry out backend processes, chief product officer Param Kahlon told VentureBeat in a recent interview in San Francisco. UiPath, a company that raised $225 million last fall at a valuation of $3 billion, added Microsoft Bot Framework functionality as well as an integration with Google's Enterprise Dialogflow last summer. Microsoft Bot Framework and Dialogflow bots are available alongside hundreds of industry-specific automated workflows and machine learning integrations in the UiPath Marketplace. UiPath is currently evaluating customer feedback and its own assessments about bots currently available on its platform before making a choice. "Initially our point of view was that we don't want to go create our own sort of conversational experience, because there's enough that exist out there. Some of our customers have said that, 'Hey we don't have our own and we want to get an end-to-end solution from you,' so we may decide to build some things that can own the end-to-end experience as well," Kahlon said.

Have a look around, and you might notice that chatbots and voice assistants have permeated our lives -- bringing an air of excitement and efficiency to manual tasks and chores. Considering the amount of time and effort we expend at the office, it's about time that assistants make their way to the workplace. Although IT and security leaders are making ongoing strides to ensure their workers are enabled with the most cutting-edge technology, the employees they support continue to dedicate countless hours to basic tasks that could otherwise be delegated to an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered sidekick. It can also be a struggle for workers to overcome learning curve challenges or get on-the-go help with support-related issues. Think about the number of requests and tickets that could be avoided if users had the ability to get this level of support from an AI voice assistant. It can be frustrating trying to find a specific email or attachment when on a mobile device, oftentimes leading to multiple searches and dead ends.

Despite the hype, vendor noise and press column inches, artificial intelligence (AI) is yet to truly deliver on its undoubted potential. Relatively few organisations are using AI in any real or meaningful sense and for now at least, it is still mostly found within early adopters. But this will change over the coming months, as organisations begin to realise the potential for AI to transform elements of their business will ultimately outweigh any reservations that have been preventing their adoption to this point. There is one area of business however, that AI has already made a firm impression - as the technology powering the next generation of enterprise apps. Enterprise apps have been growing in use and popularity, with many tech firms even creating their own app marketplaces.

As the war for talent intensifies, HR needs to focus on empowering, developing and engaging employees. Sean Nolan, CEO at Blink shares five predictions on the future of employee experience. Remember when the open office floor plan was an innovative idea? When colleagues were excited about moving email over to chat apps? Or when you only used two or three apps at work each day?

IBM Corp. and Apple Inc. are expanding their existing four-year-old pact to bring business applications to iOS devices. The crux of the announcement Tuesday at IBM's Think conference in Las Vegas is that the companies are integrating their respective artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies in order to make iOS enterprise applications smarter. They've also built a new console for developers using Apple's Swift programming language on IBM Cloud that they claim makes coding applications easier. To foster more AI in enterprise apps, IBM's Watson AI system is being integrated with Apple's Core ML machine learning framework. The new product, called IBM Watson Services for Core ML, is designed to help developers build apps that can learn from user activity in order to become smarter the more they're used.

What is behind the rise in enterprise apps and why has the apps market suddenly been alerted to the analytic power and automation of processes that AI offers? Despite the hype, vendor noise and press column inches, artificial intelligence (AI) is yet to truly deliver on its undoubted potential. Relatively few organisations are using AI in any real or meaningful sense and for now at least, it is still mostly found within early adopters. But this will change over the coming months, as organisations begin to realise the potential for AI to transform elements of their business will ultimately outweigh any reservations that have been preventing their adoption to this point. There is one area of business however, that AI has already made a firm impression – as the technology powering the next generation of enterprise apps.

Despite the hype, vendor noise and press column inches, artificial intelligence (AI) is yet to truly deliver on its undoubted potential. Relatively few organisations are using AI in any real or meaningful sense and for now at least, it is still mostly found within early adopters. But this will change over the coming months, as organisations begin to realise the potential for AI to transform elements of their business will ultimately outweigh any reservations that have been preventing their adoption to this point. There is one area of business however, that AI has already made a firm impression - as the technology powering the next generation of enterprise apps. Enterprise apps have been growing in use and popularity, with many tech firms even creating their own app marketplaces.

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to move from the summer of hype to the fall tech conference news cycle, mass confusion has begun on what AI can be used for. As with most disruptive business models, form must follow function. However, applying a spectrum of outcomes to transform the business models of AI powered organizations will indeed result in a disruptive business model and successful digital transformation. Learn how non-digital organizations can apply an AI road map to disrupt digital businesses in the best-selling Harvard Business Review Press book Disrupting Digital.