The'Fox & Friends' co-hosts discussed concerns surrounding artificial intelligence and how it will impact the internet moving forward. A Florida school district is planning to use artificial intelligence to detects guns and potential school shooting threats. Board members with the Hernando County School District voted last week to approve a one-year contract not going over $200,000 with ZeroEyes, a software company, according to FOX 13. ZeroEyes uses school district's security cameras to spot exposed or brandished firearms. The company was founded by Rob Huberty, a former Navy Seal, and claims that its software can alert first responders to a potential threat before someone is able to fire their weapon.

Apple's hiring of Google's former head of search technology and artificial intelligence is the latest sign that AI is becoming a major battleground for tech companies. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have become "a top 10 spending priority" for corporate chief information officers, Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty said in a note to clients Friday. Apple's recent hiring of AI expert John Giannandrea "reinforces this view," she said. "With the hiring of Mr. Giannandrea, who will report directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook, Apple is telling the world they are aiming to become a more serious player in the AI/machine learning industry," she said. Deployment and evaluations of AI and machine learning systems have steadily increased over the last year, Huberty said.

Apple's (AAPL) hiring of Google's former head of search technology and artificial intelligence is the latest sign that AI is becoming a major battleground for tech companies. Artificial intelligence and machine learning have become "a top 10 spending priority" for corporate chief information officers, Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty said in a note to clients Friday. Apple's recent hiring of AI expert John Giannandrea "reinforces this view," she said. "With the hiring of Mr. Giannandrea, who will report directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook, Apple is telling the world they are aiming to become a more serious player in the AI/machine learning industry," she said. Deployment and evaluations of AI and machine learning systems have steadily increased over the last year, Huberty said.

IBM's chief financial officer, Martin Schroeter, made a bold statement on the future of technology on Thursday -- and he got some pushback. "The debate about whether artificial intelligence is real is over," Schroeter said, referring to IBM's cognitive computing platform, Watson. "And we're getting to work to solve real business problems." Katy Huberty, managing director at Morgan Stanley, challenged IBM on the topic during Thursday's earnings conference call. Huberty: "My other question is Watson: From the outside, it seems this business gets a pretty significant share of the press, but not contributing to revenue. Do you have visibility yet to when we can expect an inflection in revenue recognition from Watson? Or should we just not think about this as a contributing factor, or moving the needle in our models over the next couple of years? Schroeter: "....Watson is a silver thread.

Shares of International Business Machines (IBM) are up 3.50, or 2.4%, at 151.91, after Morgan Stanley's Katy Huberty this morning reiterated an Overweight rating on the shares, and jacked her price target to 168 from 140, while she now thinks the most bullish scenario for the company could see the stock soar to 195. A lot of that depends on sentiment turning among skeptical investors, she notes: That upside scenario to 195 is predicated on the prospect that "investors begin to recognize IBM's competitive lead in Strategic Imperatives, particularly Watson." The main contention Huberty makes is that Watson, the company's artificial intelligence service, is going to double the number of customers it has this year, and that "after aggressive hiring and an estimated 5B in data acquisitions over just the past two quarters, IBM is beginning to show a path toward revenue monetization in Watson." Huberty doesn't project any financials for Watson, but she has been keeping a list of the customers that have signed up for the service, names such as Japan's SoftBank (9984JP) and Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), which give her confidence the company can make real money off of many sectors of the economy such as healthcare: From a top-down perspective, we see Watson as similar (though even more disruptive) to ERP which initially helped address human inefficiencies in business much like Watson. ERP has grown into a 150B market including software, hardware, and services and we see that as a conservative estimate for cognitive computing with IBM Watson the likely share leader.