There aren't enough data scientists in the world to go around, so Salesforce is counting on automation and an apps-centric approach to bring its Einstein artificial intelligence capabilities to the masses. At last week's Salesforce Analyst Summit in San Francisco, company executives shared details of the company's two-plus-year effort to build a highly automated data management and machine learning pipeline to deliver predictions and recommendations at scale. The work started with Exact Target predictive customer journeys, and many (though not all) Salesforce AI acquisitions are being plugged into the same automated pipeline. The system can scale, said company executives, because all data collection, data prep, feature selection, model building, hyper-parameter tuning and scoring is handled automatically. Salesforce says it spent more than two years developing an automated data management and machine learning pipeline to drive customer-specific predictions at scale. It's the engine behind Sales Cloud Einstein, Service Cloud Einstein and Marketing Cloud Einstein apps that are either already available or due out this year (see chart below).

The Skype for Business in-car app can improve productivity and safety, Volvo says. Volvo says it will add Microsoft's Skype for Business app to its new 90 Series range of cars. Motorists will be able to view upcoming meetings and their participants, and take part with one click via the vehicle's large central display, the car maker said. According to Volvo, its deal with Microsoft also includes "the exploration of using Cortana", Microsoft's digital personal assistant, with the "express intention" of adding voice recognition and contextual insights to predict the needs of drivers. Ericsson will provide the cloud-based infrastructure for the service.

Alphabet and Google began to embrace practicality in 2016 as the two closely related entities changed course on a number of efforts. After many years of teasing its own self-driving car, it chose instead to become a vendor of car technology. But in more pedestrian device pursuits, the company shifted toward going its own way. It took its virtual reality endeavors to the next level with Daydream, took ownership of its vision for Android phones with the Pixel, and threw its weight around the home with its answer to the Amazon Echo and its tripartite router solution Google Wi-Fi. Here are some things Google could do in 2017 to shore up its path. As I discussed in my column on Apple's new year's resolutions, the home environment allows providers to pick up a different set of requests than in the mobile environment offers.

For years, the Microsoft stand at CES was the anchor of the giant central hall. As soon as you came through the doors, there it was, opposite Intel. The year that Microsoft had Kinect games on the stand, the traffic jam of people playing, waiting to play, or just watching brought the front of the hall to a standstill. The Microsoft stand was where I first met Microsoft's genius scientist Steven Bathiche, showing off the Sidewinder gaming keyboard that solved n-key rollover for gamers -- and which paved the way to the detachable Surface keyboards using the same cheap optical sensors. But even though Microsoft now makes its own hardware, it no longer has a flashy stand at CES.

New York City could operate with no more than a few thousand taxis or rides if we took carpooling more seriously, researchers have suggested. When commuters share their rides through carpooling, the cost of individual transport lowers and there are potentially fewer cars on the road which can cause increased congestion and pollution. Modern ride-hailing services including Uber and Lyft, in which passengers can hail a ride through mobile devices and also share their vehicle with others, have caused controversy and are often less-than-popular with traditional taxi firms, but researchers say these services could have a real impact on how many vehicles are needed on our city roads. Currently, New York City has issued almost 14,000 official taxi medallion licenses, but according to researchers from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), the city could make do with no more than a quarter of rides. The team has developed a new algorithm which crunched the numbers and, assuming carpooling becomes more popular, MIT has come to the conclusion that NYC only needs 3,000 four-person cars to serve 98 percent of transport demand in New York City.

Automation, AI, and robotics are the real forces behind the disruption to the global job market, and they will accelerate in 2017. As we do each week, the editors of ZDNet will continue to put our heads together in 2017 and give you our weekly Monday Morning Opener--an editorial that zooms in on the most important topic in tech for the week. Now that we're sailing into the new year, we've also put a few brain cycles into zooming out on the big issues that will shape the year ahead. So after giving you the 5 biggest tech trends of 2016, we've now got the four big ones that will dominate 2017. For all the talk about artificial intelligence, robotics, and machine learning in 2016, the shadow that they cast--the real thing people are afraid of--is automation.

It was certainly a year of ups and downs for Apple, which took steps to shore up many of its products outside the core iOS portable offerings. The Apple Watch got a new user interface, but the smartwatch category drags. Apple TV got a new content navigation app (but not an integrated Apple television service). The redesigned MacBook, of course, got a wee strip of touchy goodness. Even the EarPods evolved into a game-changing wireless successor.

Lenovo has jumped the gun on CES by releasing info on its latest ThinkPad updates a few days before the annual electronics trade show. While the PC manufacturer isn't adding anything as radical as the Yoga Book's Create Pad hybrid input device, its flagship laptops will receive some of the latest computing technology as well as some other improvements. Select ThinkPads will be the first computers to include Intel's Optane storage technology, which is reportedly several times faster than current SSD tech. These laptops will only have 16GB versions of the Optane drives, so they will be used in tandem with traditional hard drives. They will also appear later in 2017 than new non-Optane ThinkPads as the drives are finalized.

Transport underpins and supports both urban and rural living worldwide. Whether this is just a runaround to get from A to B, a flight to get to a conference or distribution networks for parcels and supplies, companies and the general public require a strong transport infrastructure for cities and businesses to thrive. However, as transport is so ingrained, new and innovative solutions are required to lessen the strain of traditional fossil fuel use on our environment, reduce congestion in cities, and keep businesses moving. It is not just land-based vehicles, however, which are being scrutinized -- but how we can use airspace more effectively and potentially even create new revenue streams through Mars settlements and space tourism. Over 2016, vendors have made headway in different aspects of tourism, with renewable energy and smart city living coming in as major trends.

The pace of storage change continues to accelerate, and its impact on us continues to grow. Digital storage is central to a digital civilization, and as we grow more digital, we grow more dependent on improvements in storage. Here's what to expect in 2017. AI will make stored data - and therefore storage- more valuable. When you can take - as we can today - a grainy surveillance video or a blurred face and read a license plate number of determine someone's identity using AI, the value of stored data rises, for good or ill.