Data collection, and their analysis with the help of Artificial Intelligence are making work more productive and efficient each day. But soon AI will become more autonomous and more demanding. Not a day passes without progress in the artificial intelligence sector as it slowly becomes mainstream. There are those who are alarmed the whole thing will bring about unemployment for all. One French series, Terpalium, describes a dystopian future where AI has led to a situation in which an elite few enjoy all the joys of modern life while most of the population is in a vegetative state of misery and laziness.

AI will destroy jobs, robots will replace humans … That's what we often hear when we talk about the evolution of AI and the rise of robots. But what if Artificial Intelligence could actually boost the economy? We recently conducted a study with Censuswide and asked around 1000 British citizens how they felt about AI and its impact on the automation of their calendar management tasks. One interesting thing to notice is that 47% of professionals in the UK would be interested in using Artificial Intelligence powered assistants to gain time. And how would they spend the time they saved?

One question we often hear in the tech industry is: Will A.I. destroy jobs and ultimately the society in which we live? The fact that A.I. could one day become smarter than humans is not the main issue here. What people mean when they express this concern is: "Will bots replace us?" In many countries, the service industry is responsible for most of the GDP, and people feel safe simply knowing that machines couldn't do what they do -- which has been the case for a long time. During the Industrial Revolution, machines did replace some workers in factories and on farms, but even now, people are needed to run and maintain the machines.

As important as we all (think we) are, we can't all afford to have assistants scheduling our lives on our behalf. But thanks to the rise of the machine, your busy life might've just gotten a little more manageable. Meet Julie Desk, the artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistant that organizes your meetings. Because you already have to spend your time going to these things -- at the very least, you shouldn't be wasting your time scheduling them, right? Launched in 2015, Julie Desk promises to simplify and humanize your relationships to technology (and other people) by automatically managing all the available information required to go about your day-to-day life.

The competition among Siri, Cortana, Google Now, Alexa, and Facebook's M (still in its early stages), has kept the spotlight on virtual assistants for the last couple of years. The assistants and the AI technologies that power them have piqued the interest of venture capitalists as well. "Having written a bad version of ELIZA [an early-stage natural language processing program] as one of my earliest programs, I have been excited about the prospect of conversing with machines for a long time. So I will be watching this development closely…" Union Square Ventures' Albert Wenger wrote in his blog. We've identified 21 startups working in the virtual assistant space or providing underlying technology to power digital assistants that either received either Series B, Series A, or seed/angel funds since 2015.