This year was far from the perfect environment for many startups looking to grow their business. But despite uncertainty here in the US and overseas, a slew of entrepreneurs took the plunge and started their own businesses. Success came to founders and investors who focused on high-growth areas. Those include the ride-sharing app Juno, which competes with big players like Uber and Lyft, as well as several companies focused on cybersecurity and virtual reality, among others. So what will the number one startup trend be in 2017?

Office 365 is going to get a whole lot smarter, all thanks to Genee. Genee, an AI that has been around for two and a half years, is essentially a digital assistant that books appointments, sets reminders, and can even reschedule meetings on the fly using simple commands from your phone or computer. Now, Genee is set to come to Office 365, and it is not exactly clear what role it will play. "As we continue to build new Office 365 productivity capabilities and services our customers value, I'm confident the Genee team will help us further our ambition to bring intelligence into every digital experience," writes Corporate Vice President for Microsoft Outlook and Office 365, Rajesh Jha, in an official release. According to Genee co-founders Ben Cheung and Charles Lee, the service shuts down on September 1 in its current form.

But some of the clerical work associated with organizing and documenting meetings now might be outsourced to artificially intelligent machines. Isn't artificial intelligence for big tasks such as self-driving cars, automated trading and facial recognition? Once the stuff of science fiction, AI is quickly becoming widespread, available and even commoditized. While AI eventually will play a much larger role in just about everything we all do, the first AI application you touch almost certainly will perform tedious, relatively minor tasks. In business, that means helping you with your meetings.

By the "end of 2016 more than 80 of the world's 100 largest enterprise software companies by revenues will have integrated cognitive technologies into their products", said Deloitte. On Monday Microsoft announced it had purchased Genee, a smart scheduling app startup. Genee's artificial intelligence technology will be integrated into Microsoft's Office 365. Microsoft has been actively acquiring similar businesses this year in order to make sure it is well placed for the digital revolution, which will see AI at its core. It has already purchased app development platform Xamarin, intelligent smartphone keyboard SwiftKey, and LinkedIn for more than 26 billion.

Tech giant Microsoft has acquired artificial intelligence (AI)-based scheduling service Genee that simplifies the scheduling and rescheduling of large group meetings for companies. Microsoft will integrate the AI technology into Office 365 before shutting down Genee. Co-founders Ben Cheung and Charles Lee, who plan to join Microsoft, started Genee in 2014 to simplify the time-consuming task of scheduling (and rescheduling) meetings. "It is especially useful for large groups and for when you don't have access to someone's calendar," Jha added. Genee uses natural language processing and optimised decision-making algorithms so that interacting with a virtual assistant is just like interacting with a human one.

DAILY VIDEO: Microsoft to acquire Genee for smarter Office 365 scheduling; Google pulls plug on Chrome apps for Windows, Linux, Mac; Intel brings Xeon chips to AT&T's network virtualization effort; and there's more. The Dell PowerEdge R630 is a mainstream 2S/1U rack server that delivers incredible density across a... With the introduction of the Dell PowerEdge FM 120x4, Dell and Intel are bringing to market a server... The Dell PowerEdge R730xd, also based on Intel Xeon processors, is one of the world's densest... The Dell PowerEdge T630 is a mainstream 2S/5U rack-mount tower server with a versatile mix of... Dell's latest generation of Intel-based PowerEdge servers has the power and flexibility to solve all... Dell's latest Intel-based PowerEdge servers bring new levels of operational efficiency and... Today's businesses need to innovate to compete.

Microsoft on Monday announced it bought a startup to boost its artificial intelligence capabilities, and rival Apple confirmed it has boosted... Microsoft did not disclose financial terms of its deal to buy Genee, which specialises in using machine smarts to handle the time-sucking task of scheduling meetings. "Genee uses natural language processing and optimised decision-making algorithms so that interacting with a virtual assistant is just like interacting with a human one," Outlook and Office 365 corporate vice president Rajesh Jha said in a blog post. For example, Genee can be copied into an email exchange to act as a virtual assistant of sorts to pin down a time for a business or social meeting. Jha touted Genee as having designed "an intelligent virtual assistant specialised in the appointment decision." The technology was expected to be put to work in Office 365 software that Microsoft offers as a service in the internet cloud.

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