In May, Tessa went rogue. The National Eating Disorder Association's chatbot had recently replaced a phone hotline and the handful of staffers who ran it. But although it was designed to deliver a set of approved responses to people who might be at risk of an eating disorder, Tessa instead recommended that they lose weight. "Every single thing that Tessa suggested were things that led to the development of my eating disorder," one woman who reviewed the chatbot wrote on Instagram. "It was not our intention to suggest that Tessa could provide the same type of human connection that the Helpline offered," the nonprofit's CEO, Liz Thompson, told NPR.

Today Microsoft employs over 8,000 researchers and engineers directly applied to artificial intelligence technologies. These individuals either fit centrally into Microsoft's AI & R (artificial intelligence & research) team or they fit into each business unit's own engineering pool. Unlike a number of its competitors, Microsoft isn't going to name its artificial intelligence with a human name. Think Einstein from Salesforce and Watson from IBM amongst others. "At Microsoft, we don't see Artificial Intelligence as a product, we see it as a strategy that all of our products and customers can benefit from. It's making its way into everything we do a Microsoft" said David Carmona, Cloud and Enterprise Artificial Intelligence General Manager at Microsoft.

Artificial intelligence can write copy and manage programmatic media buying at warp speed. It can drive a car and even diagnose cancer. AI is increasingly acting like humans, so companies are putting big resources and marketing money into branding AI with human-like qualities, down to naming their technology after people. Amazon reportedly picked Alexa for its smart assistant because of its ties to Star Trek and use of soft vowels combined with an'x', making it a unique word that doesn't easily roll off the tongue (unless you have the misfortune of being named Alexa). Meanwhile, IBM considered a slew of names before landing on Watson, a nod to the company's first CEO Thomas J. Watson.