With the majority of the holiday shopping season now behind us, we can take a high-level look to see how various companies performed during the season. Specifically, when it comes to digital assistants, app installs are generally a good benchmark of performance. Looking at both the iOS app store and Google Play, Amazon appears to have had a home run of a holiday season with its Alexa app topping charts for both platforms. Google has a Google Home app that is at the number 6 position for top free apps for iOS and number 2 position on Android, indicating that its hardware also sold well this year. There are also two other players, Microsoft and Apple and the story is quite clear here.

Back at Google I/O, CEO Sundar Pichai outlined the company's vision as an "AI first" company, with a new focus on contextual information, machine learning, and using intelligent technology to improve customer experience. The launch of the Pixel 2 and 2 XL, the latest batch of Google Home products, and the Google Clips offer a glimpse into what this long-term strategic shift could mean. We'll get to Google's latest smartphones in a minute, but there's much more to explore about the company's latest strategy. As part of the Google I/O 2017 keynote, Sundar Pichai announced that the company's various machine learning and artificial intelligence efforts and teams are being brought together under a new initiative called Google.ai. Google.ai will be focusing not only on research, but on developing tools such as TensorFlow and its new Cloud TPUs, and "applied AI".

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Microsoft has bought a startup to boost its artificial intelligence capabilities, and rival Apple confirmed it has boosted its health focus with an acquisition of its own. Microsoft did not disclose financial terms of its deal to buy Genee, which specialises in using machine smarts to handle the time-sucking task of scheduling meetings. "Genee uses natural language processing and optimized decision-making algorithms so that interacting with a virtual assistant is just like interacting with a human one," Outlook and Office 365 corporate vice president Rajesh Jha said in a blog post. For example, Genee can be copied into an email exchange to act as a virtual assistant of sorts to pin down a time for a business or social meeting. Jha touted Genee as having designed "an intelligent virtual assistant specialized in the appointment decision."

The race to acquire artificial intelligence talent has inverted the "laws" of M&A, with pre-revenue AI firms such as UK-based Magic Pony being sold to Twitter for about 10m per employee. Magister Advisors, the global M&A advisory firm to the technology industry, notes that AI firms without revenues are more valuable than those with, as buyers look for pristine competitive advantage, and that Britain is amongst top tier for AI innovation. Twitter just paid 150m for 14-person Magic Pony, a UK-based AI visual search company barely anyone had heard of before the deal. At 10m per employee it marks a high water mark in AI for what is essentially a team acquisition. Magister has tracked 26 AI driven deals since 2014 in the US, Europe and Israel, 11 of which involved companies with less than 50 employees which were acquired largely, or entirely, for the team and capability. Across all 11 deals, the median price paid per employee has reached 2.4m, meaning a high quality AI company with 40 employees would be valued at near 100m - even if it had little or no revenue.