First, a disclaimer: please, please don't tell other journalists that I told you about this app. Almost everyone I know wants me to shut up about it, in case it becomes popular and the'free' tier is stripped out. Otter.ai is probably the most useful, transformative app I've come across in years. In other words, it can turn live (or recorded) audio into written, editable text. It's not hard to imagine the utility of such an app for a whole range of working professionals.

Traveling between Silicon Valley, Austin and Boston, I am hearing about artificial intelligence and the future of work from so many angles and couldn't be more excited about the opportunities ahead. The strategies and applications are enticing and the next wave is promising. However, as we rush to embrace AI, I can't help wondering whether we are maximizing its full potential or just riding from technology wave to technology wave. For instance, today our walls talk to us – almost everything in our lives talk to us. With a modest investment, smart technology sensors capture data we use to monitor, measure and manage our energy usage and efficiency (and more).

For many, the holiday season is a time of reflection, both from a personal and professional standpoint. I won't get too deep into politics and pop culture, but can't reflect on 2016 without thinking about the 2016 US presidential election and the Chicago Cub's finally winning the world series after 108 years. In my professional life I recall the challenges faced and overcome, the triumphs and even missed opportunities. Hopefully there were more triumphs than missed opportunities in your professional life, but reflecting on both can help prepare and potentially create your own opportunities in the new year – particularly if you work in digital commerce. If you're a digital commerce professional, either an online retailer or a B2B seller, last year saw a few milestones that are sure to impact your business in 2017 and beyond.

Jack Clark and I are both lapsed technology journalists, and he writes one of my favorite new newsletters of this year, Import AI, which summarizes major research, hires and products in the space. He now works for OpenAI, alongside a team of researchers, where he handles policy, communications and partnerships. OpenAI is an AI research lab set up by former Stripe CTO Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman. Its mission is to build safe AI, and ensure AI's benefits are as widely and evenly distributed as possible. Q: Before you joined OpenAI, you were a journalist -- like me. In fact, you called yourself the world's first and "only neural network reporter" while you were at Bloomberg. What made you decide to cross over? I think there are three things that are going to affect the world in incredibly significant ways over the next decade and they are 1) Climate change 2) CRISPR and 3) artificial intelligence.

The Machine Learning Handbook is an eBook that I wrote comprising of my notes from Stanford's online Machine Learning course on Coursera.