Major announcements made at Dreamforce 2017 focused on five new applications for greater personalization of solutions, a host of product enhancements and nudging customers to move to the new Lightning platform. This event report analyzes the announcements made at Dreamforce 2017 in the following areas: artificial intelligence and analytics; front-office adoption; personal productivity and collaboration; platform; and Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud.

Tesla chief executive Elon Musk said on Tuesday that the company planned to make a product announcement later today. The company declined to offer details before the announcement. Tesla chief executive Elon Musk said on Tuesday that the company planned to make a product announcement later today, causing shares in the firm to spike. Shares rose more than 1 percent after the post and were recently trading up 3.69, or 1.7 percent, to 226.62 a share. Internet users have specualted the announcement could be a larger capacity battery for its car, or a new'powerwall' system for homes.

Apple, known for its steady stream of slick consumer electronic devices, used its annual developer conference in San Francisco to roll out a raft of millennial-friendly texting tools to enhance emojis, image sharing and add animations to messages. Among a two-hour stream of product announcements at the annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) event, Apple engineers demonstrated the latest update of Apple's smartphone software iOS, which will now let iPhone users add larger emojis, see photos and videos appear in a stream of text messages, add animated effects and "emojify" messages by converting typed words into emoji. Opening the event with a moment of silence for the victims of the weekend's shooting at a gay night club in Orlando, CEO Tim Cook – who has become a leader on gay rights issues since talking about his own sexuality in 2014 – called the attacks a "senseless unconscionable act of terrorism and hate aimed at dividing and destroying". Cook then set about laying out his vision for a future where Apple's software forms the central hub of its customers' lives, helping track their fitness, send love notes, navigate the road and trade pictures of cute dogs. Apple is clearly responding to the voice of the consumer; messages is the most popular app on iOS, and the new features are designed to offer more playful options that replicate some successful third party messaging apps. "We're providing emoji predictions as you type," said Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering.

When I wrote that we look for interest,ing articles, I made an exception, namely that we will not accept articles that reviewed or promoted commercial products. I felt that promotional articles were likely to be biased, sales-oriented and/or lacking in technical content. Reviews (particularly unfavorable ones) were bound to be criticized by the vendors as biased, uninformed, cursory, incomplete, etc. I still believe that these would be the results, although I have no evidence to prove it. At our annual AAAI Publications Committee meeting in August, the Committee suggested that I back off from this policy a little bit.