If you haven't met Sia, perhaps you should get to know her. Sia is a digital AI assistant who helps make sense of the deluge of unstructured data. My company, Opentopic, a 25-employee startup, developed Sia for people who work in the financial services industry. Powered by IBM Watson and blockchain, purple-haired Sia won't tell anyone what to do or predict the future. But she can unlock insights from the overwhelming volume of public and private data that comes at people every second of their professional lives.

It looks a little further out into the future than I normally tend to. It attempts to simplify a topic that has more than it's share of coolness, confusion and complexity. While the phrase Artificial Intelligence has been around since the first human wondered if she could go further if she had access to entities with inorganic intelligence, it truly jumped the shark in 2016. Primarily because we got our first real everyday access to products and services that used some form of AI to delight us. No more theory, we felt it! I'm going to take a very long walk with you today.

International Business Machines Corp. and Salesforce.com Inc. agreed to mingle their artificial-intelligence technologies in a bid to boost sales of the powerful data-analytics offerings. The companies Monday announced plans to offer integrated AI services that weave the broad humanlike conversation and learning capabilities of IBM's Watson with Salesforce's more sales-oriented Einstein technology. The new offerings, available in the second half of the year, are aimed at helping a wide variety of companies better target products and services at customers. IBM CEO: AI Will Be Man and Machine, Not Man vs. Machine. Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM, said that she believes that believes artificial intelligence will help to create jobs and that clients will have a "symbiotic relationship" with AI.

When you arrive at the office at 8 a.m., there's a lot that stands between you and the work you need get done that day. Pull up yesterday's blog traffic. Check in on the monthly lead count. Build a list for your next email send. Report on the results of your latest content campaign … Some days, it's easy to feel like you don't actually spend that much time marketing.

Artificial intelligence (AI) had a coming out party of sorts in 2016. Even though it has been in development for decades, this year, with the perfect combination of cheap computing power and access to increasing amounts of data, it seems AI's time has come. Its first foray in business has been directed at making salespeople more efficient at every level of the sales workflow. If you think about it, it makes sense to start with the part of the company that drives revenue. Certainly the vendors recognize that, says Alan Lepofsky, an analyst at Constellation Research, who is working on the impact of AI on work.

There is a lot of confusion these days about Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL), yet the distinction is very clear to practitioners in these fields. Are you able to articulate the difference? There is a lot of confusion these days about Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL). There certainly is a massive uptick of articles about AI being a competitive game changer and that enterprises should begin to seriously explore the opportunities. The distinction between AI, ML and DL are very clear to practitioners in these fields.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is surging in ad/mar tech land. Or resurging, depending on how good your memory is. IBM continues to push Watson, and, in the run-up to their respective conferences, Salesforce and Oracle talked up their own AI initiatives. Also, Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon banded together to create best practices around AI technologies. And startups like Adgorithms, Boomtrain, Cognitiv, Kenshoo, Lattice Engines, Rocket Fuel and numerous others continue to extol the virtues of their AI-powered applications. Unfortunately, AI has become an umbrella term in the marketing/advertising world.

If pop culture is to be believed, society is quickly heading toward a highly automated future ruled by artificial intelligence. Take Iron Man's trusty sidekick, J.A.R.V.I.S. Within the Marvel franchise, the artificial intelligence system is able to think, act, and feel like a human. The supporting character is even sarcastic and witty -- both trademark human characteristics. In some ways, J.A.R.V.I.S. seems like a better human than most humans. With the release of AI technologies like IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein, in addition to the recent buzz about the "Partnership on AI," which has brought together some of the world's biggest tech companies to advance research in the sector, it might seem like that fantasy is quickly turning into reality.

Every 60 seconds, Facebook users share 2,460,000 pieces of content and Yelp receives 26,380 reviews. Then there's the 2 million blog posts created each day and the 1 billion websites available for us to peruse. With all of this content floating around the internet, marketers struggle to truly engage and convert an increasingly fragmented online audience. Using Watson services, Opentopic helps clients solve that problem in a 2-step process. First, they help the client discover and analyze target audiences.