By now, the story is well told on how artificial intelligence is changing businesses, all the way down to impacting core business models. In 2017, Amazon bought Whole Foods then later opened their Amazon Go automated store. Since then, they've been using AI to understand and improve the physical retail shopping experience. In 2018, Keller Williams announced a pivot towards becoming an artificial intelligence-driven technology company to compete with the tech-centric entrants into the market like Zillow and Redfin. These companies are not alone.

What is AI? Everything you need to know about Artificial Intelligence Like just about every other business sector, the real estate industry is quickly learning that data is one of its most valuable assets. After 36 years in the business, Keller Williams has plenty of data to work with -- as well as a vast network of real estate agents it can turn to for help keeping that data fresh and useful. When Neil Dholakia joined Keller Williams as chief product officer in 2017, the company was already intent on modernizing. "We didn't want to be the Blockbuster to Zillow's Netflix, or the Blockbuster to Redfin's Netflix," Dholakia told ZDNet. "You name the company that started up in the last five years, or 10 years for that matter -- they all look at us as an old guard company, and we're the Blockbuster that they're going to Netflix."

While I don't need to convince you on the importance of good information, I often find myself in the position to convince businesses to do more with theirs. In fact, data should be the most important thing on the agenda. That may be more of a stretch for most. After the Scientific Revolution, knowledge was defined by our ability to apply mathematics to empirical data. Intelligence is the ability to perceive or infer information, and to retain it as knowledge to be applied towards adaptive behaviors within an environment or context.

AI capabilities are advancing rapidly, but the results are mixed. While chatbots and digital assistants are improving generally, the results can be laughable, perplexing and perhaps even unsettling. Google's recent demonstration of Duplex, its natural language technology that completes tasks over the phone, is noteworthy. Whether you love it or hate it, two things are true: It doesn't sound like your grandfather's AI; the use case matters. One of the striking characteristics of the demo, assuming it actually was a demo and not a fake, as some publications have suggested, is the use of filler language in the digital assistant's speech such as "um" and uh" that make it sound human. Even more impressive, (again, assuming the demo is real), is the fact that Duplex reasons adeptly on-the-fly despite the ambiguous, if not confusing, responses provided by a restaurant hostess on the other end of the line. Of course, the use case is narrow. In the demo, Duplex is simply making a hair appointment and attempting to make a restaurant reservation. In the May 8 Google Duplex blog introducing the technology, Yaniv Leviathan, principal engineer and Yossi Matias, VP of Engineering explain: "One of the key research insights was to constrain Duplex to closed domains, which are narrow enough to explore extensively.

At Google I/O this year, Google quietly introduced a new chatbot analytics platform called Chatbase, a project developed within the company's internal R&D incubator, Area 120. Today, that platform is being publicly launched to all, after testing with hundreds of early adopters including Ticketmaster, HBO, Keller Williams, Viber, and others. The idea behind Chatbase's cloud service is to offer tools to more easily analyze and optimize chatbots. This includes giving bot builders the ability to understand what works to increase customer conversions, improve the bot's accuracy, and create a better user experience. This data is available through an analytics dashboard, where developers can track specific metrics like active users, sessions, and user retention.