From The Love Bug through to Westworld, movies and TV shows have evolved self-driving vehicles to create unforgettable moments. But consumers remain wary of their real-life counterparts as they start to roll out onto roads around the world. Vanarama has visualised the 20 most iconic on-screen autonomous vehicles from 1960s to present day in an infographic timeline. We're getting closer to traveling from A to B in autonomous cars by the day, with a projected market of $615bn by 2026 (up from $27bn in 2017) including auto manufacturers such as BMW, Audi, Toyota to more disruptive tech-led businesses like Tesla, Google, Uber. A recent study by trend analysts ResearchAndMarkets has predicted that the global autonomous market is likely to reach a value of $615bn by 2026.

AI has been identified as a threat to the warehouse and logistics industry, but what about retail workers? A new report from Blue Yonder looks at how AI could support rather than replace human retail workers. A report from the Martin School at the University of Oxford and Citi estimated that, while perhaps unsurprisingly 80 per cent of retail transportation, warehousing and logistics jobs are at risk due to automation and artificial intelligence, 63 per cent of sales positions are also under threat. Uwe Weiss, CEO at Blue Yonder, argues that removing sales staff from the shop floor to be replaced by AI would be the wrong approach for retailers, as they should be enabling their employees to do what they do best, providing friendly, responsive and bespoke customer service, and letting the machines take care of the manual time-consuming processes, such as replenishment, that require analysis of vast quantities of data and keep staff away from delivering good customer service. For decades, large-scale retail companies have used manual processes to anticipate consumer demand, and stock replenishment has often been based on gut feeling, assumptions, existing agreements with wholesalers and expectations that are hard to measure.

How can chatbots improve the user experience in ecommerce? This infographic looks at how AI can help customer service agents focus on more complicated tasks. Chatbots are artificially intelligent tools capable of engaging multiple users for communicating basic information. Their importance in conversational commerce is growing by the day as social media giants like Facebook have already deployed around 12,000 bots on messenger. Chatbots have demonstrated a lot of potential in E-Commerce due to their instantaneity and ease of use.

It's no secret that AI is going to advance and grow beyond anything we could have imagined just decades ago, but is the future of AI going to be positive or negative? RS Components has collated the opinions and thoughts, in the form of well known quotes, of some of the biggest names in the science and technology industries to determine whether we should be excited about what the future of AI holds, or if its impact could be more negative than positive. Since 2012, the overall opinion of the future of AI has become more positive and more and more big names in science and tech appear to be embracing it rather than fearing it. The founder of Facebook has a much more positive outlook on the future of AI than physicist Stephen Hawking, with Zuckerberg believing that AI will improve humans' health and safety whilst Hawking believes that AI could, in fact, lead to the end of the human race as we know it. This suggests that the more we understand about AI, the more elements we'll recognise that have the potential to improve and enhance aspects of our lives.

While artificial intelligence is becomes a major new tool for marketers, nearly one in two retailers are missing out on leveraging AI marketing to better understand customer behaviours, according to new research. The study, conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Emarsys, looked at the growing role of AI in the retail and e-commerce industries. In an industry that's thought to be going through a'creativity crisis', there's some good news for retail marketers amongst the findings: The study, entitled'Building Trust and Confidence: AI Marketing Readiness in Retail and e-Commerce1', sought to understand if there is still a gap between the readiness of AI marketing solutions to execute on real-time B2C marketing campaigns, and the readiness of marketing tech users and business decision makers to adopt AI marketing technology. Businesses polled across US, UK, Germany, France and Australia had revenues from at least $50m to more than $5bn. The study highlighted that marketers and business decision makers polled believe AI-powered marketing will shift the role of marketing toward more strategic work (79%) and make marketing teams more efficient (86%) and effective (86%), as well as enabling them to focus on value-generating tasks as AI automates workflows (82%) and reinventing the way that marketers work (82%).

Facebook is now building chatbots that can negotiate and plan ahead like actual humans in a new AI experiment carried out by the social network's "Labs". According to New Scientist, the research could lead to more effective personal assistants able to negotiate on our behalf, such as sorting out calendar clashes. In the experiment, Facebook trained the bots by showing them negotiation dialogues between real people, then training the bots to "imitate people's actions," a process called supervised learning. In the training, the bots were asked to divide up a number of objects that each correlated with a different point value. The goal was to divide the objects through negotiation and end up with the most possible points.

Artificial intelligence advertising firm LoopMe has won an additional $10m funding, a total of $17 million to date, as machine learning becomes a vital part of digital marketing. The new funding was received from Impulse VC and Harbert European Growth Capital to support global growth and continued investment in artificial intelligence technology. Existing investors Holzbrinck Ventures and Open Ocean Capital also participated in the round. LoopMe now counts investment from UK, Germany, Finland, North America, China and Russia, signaling global support for its AI technology. LoopMe's AI technology learns how people feel about and react to advertising, and changes their advertising experience based on their individual feedback loop. Since receiving its previous round of funding in 2015, LoopMe reached profitability for the full year 2016, more than doubled its sales revenue and team size, opened offices in LA, Bangalore, Johannesburg and Moscow, and invested heavily in its technology.

Big data continues to be the fastest-growing segment of the information management software market. New findings from Ovum estimates that the big data market will grow from $1.7bn in 2016 to $9.4bn by 2020, comprising 10% of the overall market for information management tooling. Ovum's 2017 Trends to Watch: Big Data report highlights that while the breakout use case for big data in 2017 will be streaming, machine learning will be the factor that disrupts the landscape the most. Under the covers, machine learning is already becoming ubiquitous as it is embedded in many services that consumers take for granted. Increasingly, machine learning is becoming embedded in enterprise software and tooling for integrating and preparing data.

With Facebook and Twitter now offering branded chatbots, how can brands get the most out of AI-powered customer service? Matt Wright, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) freelancer and Venturebeat contributor, looks at the 8 basic conversations your bot should be well-versed in before meeting your consumers. Chatbots are robotic messenger services where audiences can ask a robotic chat simulator basic questions. They may well in the future sit prominently on your brand site, helping to replace and make the most of website chat widgets, WhatsApp conversations, Facebook Messenger chats, Kik or in combination with voice search services such as Siri, Amazon Alexa, Google voice search or Google Home. Chat bots should really be exciting SEOs right now if your ask me https://t.co/crQdzVBYnF

Benjamin Graham, Director of Communication at personalised marketing app Clemmie, looks at how marketers can make the most of AI. If you believe the blogs, magazine features and tabloid news stories, AI is a revelation, and it's going to change everything. From op-eds predicting humanity's end at the hands of superior intelligence to scientists feverishly discussing the future of medical care, AI is on everyone's lips. Reporting on AI often seems to focus on the worst-case scenario, but AI can change our lives for the better and revolutionise the way we interact with technology, the world, and even each other. The ways in which we perceive the world around us is in a constant flux as technology develops.