Let us go back a few years. Do you remember the movie Robot starring Rajinikanth? Chitti, played by Rajinikanth, had the ability to follow and exhibit human emotions. What was once in the realm of films, fiction and fantasy is becoming a reality over time. And time is really moving fast.

Let us go back a few years. Do you remember the movie Robot starring Rajinikanth? Chitti, played by Rajinikanth, had the ability to follow and exhibit human emotions. What was once in the realm of films, fiction and fantasy is becoming a reality over time. And time is really moving fast.

The Netflix-produced hit was the result of an algorithm coupled with Netflix's large collection of data on what viewers like to watch. Taking that as inspiration, ad agency McCann Erickson recently added the world's first artificial intelligence (AI)-based creative director to its team in Japan. The memorably named AI-CD β will use data on award-winning commercials to produce ideas for new campaigns. The company isn't the first to let the math do the thinking: In 2014, Hong Kong–based venture capital firm Deep Knowledge Ventures announced a new addition to its board of directors, VITAL, which uses data to vote on potential investments. More recently, Finnish tech company Tieto welcomed Alicia T., an AI complete with a conversational interface, to the board (a win for board diversity?) of its new data-driven business services unit. This doesn't mean AI-based technology will become your overlords or replacements.

The Netflix-produced hit was the result of an algorithm coupled with Netflix's large collection of data on what viewers like to watch. Taking that as inspiration, ad agency McCann Erickson recently added the world's first artificial intelligence (AI)-based creative director to its team in Japan. The memorably named AI-CD β will use data on award-winning commercials to produce ideas for new campaigns. The company isn't the first to let the math do the thinking: In 2014, Hong Kong–based venture capital firm Deep Knowledge Ventures announced a new addition to its board of directors, VITAL, which uses data to vote on potential investments. More recently, Finnish tech company Tieto welcomed Alicia T., an AI complete with a conversational interface, to the board (a win for board diversity?) of its new data-driven business services unit.

In my last article "Natural Evolution: From chatbots to fully A.I integrated applications", I touched upon the Artificially Intelligent member of staff I have been developing that assists businesses with running their day to day via the TechBubble GUI. Whilst developing the A.I. I had become stuck on the decision of whether or not the A.I. should have the ability to interact with its team members in a way that was outside of the scope of being a business assistant, in other words, should the A.I. be able to hold general conversation, to some degree, with its team members, or should it only be allowed to converse on subjects that are specific to the tasks in hand. After posting the questions, I realized that I should of worded question 1 better, but it actually raised some interesting views. What I had meant by "would you expect the A.I. to be a sort of authority that would answer and then prompt them to carry on work" was: would a business owner expect the A.I. to be able to answer general question to some extent, but ensure that it stayed on track with whatever task it was assisting its team member with, and make sure that the staff member was aware that it was not a chatbot to have fun with or general conversation. This part of the question seemed to be the part that was picked up on first by the people replying.