Tech giants Apple (AAPL), Alphabet (GOOGL), Facebook (FB), and Microsoft (MSFT) have raced to apply artificial intelligence to their businesses, and the oil industry is starting to seize on AI's benefits too. The reason interest is surging now is because artificial intelligence is "actually doable," he said in an interview with IBD at CERAWeek, explaining that advancements in cloud computing and infrastructure have made AI more affordable and accessible. "The industrial world is waking up to best practices," he said. "They are all waking up to it." Several heavyweights in the energy industry are already investors in his company, including General Electric (GE), Chevron (CVX), Royal Dutch Shell (RDSA) and Saudi Aramco.

Graphics chip maker Nvidia (NVDA) is well-positioned to fight off emerging competitors in the market for chips for artificial-intelligence applications, a Wall Street analyst said Tuesday. These rivals include application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) or semi-custom chip systems such as Alphabet (GOOGL)-owned Google's tensor processing units, Intel's (INTC) Nervana, and upcoming systems from privately held Graphcore and Cerebras Systems, Mosesmann said. "It is possible for ASICs over time to be successful in the deep-learning world," Mosesmann said. "However, we are of the opinion that at this stage in a multidecade product cycle it is just too early to'fix' the hardware, given that there is a plethora of deep-learning frameworks (Tensorflow, Caffee, MXNet, CNTK, etc.), that may take years to settle on which open-sourced varietals will win." Customers will gravitate to Nvidia's GPUs for deep learning in part because of the company's compute-platform and programming model, called CUDA, he said.

The popular Super Bowl commercial laid out a tongue-in-cheek crisis in the future of AI. What to do in a world dependent on artificial intelligence in business and at home?

Salesforce.com (CRM) stock hit a all-time high on Thursday as Barclay's raised its price target on the enterprise software maker with a bullish view of its artificial intelligence tools. Barclays hiked its price target to 127 from 117. Salesforce.com gained 1.6% to close at 111.77 on the stock market today, hitting a new high. "The combination of its AI capabilities (through Einstein) and the largest CRM (customer relationship management) database in the world (a key input factor for any AI model), will enable salesforce to offer the most powerful system in the space, which enables better pricing and customer retention," said Raimo Lenschow, a Barclays analyst in a report. Shares in Salesforce.com have jumped nearly 10% in 2018 and are up 47% from a year ago.

As its stock hit a record high Friday, Microsoft's (MSFT) price target was raised on the view that its products and initiatives around artificial intelligence are undervalued. X KeyBanc Capital Markets analyst Brent Bracelin raised his price target on Microsoft to 106 from 94 and maintained a rating of overweight. "After meeting with senior leaders at Microsoft who are spearheading new AI products and initiatives, we came away impressed with Microsoft's AI product scope, ambitions to differentiate, and the three-year potential to capitalize on this wide-open market opportunity," Bracelin wrote in a research note to clients. Microsoft shares climbed 1.7% near 89.60 on the stock market today, setting a new high. Bracelin said he met with senior leaders at Microsoft last month and came away "very impressed by Microsoft's AI platform and the traction with embedding and implementing AI services in the enterprise."

LAS VEGAS – While finished products get most of the attention at the annual CES consumer electronics show, "ingredient technologies" are the unsung heroes, setting the stage for exciting new devices and services in the years ahead. X Two of those "ingredient technologies" being touted at CES 2018 are 5G wireless and artificial intelligence, officials say. "5G and AI are heralds for the coming data age," said Steve Koenig, senior director of research for the Consumer Technology Association, owner and sponsor of CES, which opened Tuesday and runs through Friday. "CES is going to set the pace for that." It will fuel new services and technologies such as the Internet of Things, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles and smart cities.

Eighty percent of smartphones shipped in 2022 will have artificial intelligence capabilities, up from 10% last year as Apple (AAPL), Korea's Samsung and others move from voice assistants to augmented reality and other apps, says research firm Gartner. X "With smartphones increasingly becoming a commodity device, vendors are looking for ways to differentiate their products," C.K. Lu, research director at Gartner, said in a news release. Apple's new iPhone X features its own machine-learning optimized A11 bionic chip. The AI chip supports facial recognition as a way to unlock phone screens. Apple in 2018 is expected to roll out new AI tools to support augmented reality.