With that mind, I decided to attend the "Building B2B Bots" session hosted by Dharmesh Shah, Founder and CTO HubSpot inbound marketing. The digital marketing whiz and noted startup angel investor led the conversation about bots and how they will affect how we'll do business in the near future. Why is there buzz surrounding chatbots? Decades ago businesses started building websites, now they will start building bots. Shah explained, "What 1997 was to Internet and browsers, 2017 is to bots."

Whatever you want to learn, whatever you want to explore or whatever you just plain want to discuss, SXSW Interactive has you covered. This is my fourth time attending SXSW Interactive, and the big themes emerging this week have centered around augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI). For brevity's sake, I'm going to drill down to one area of AI in which I'm particularly excited--bots. To be even more specific, chatbots on messaging apps. As the head of global social strategy and operations at DocuSign, I index for #SXSW talks at which representatives of the social media platforms--especially the ones on which we have a DocuSign branded presence--are speaking so I can keep up with the rapid advancements and, hopefully, stay one step ahead of becoming a marketing dinosaur.

What CFO wouldn't want to find a way to radically lower the cost of operations, boost productivity, increase insight across their company, and launch a range of new business opportunities? That's the promise of AI--and in the very near future, failing to use AI will be tantamount to management malfeasance, said Malcolm Frank, chief strategy officer and CMO of Cognizant, an international consulting and professional services company, during a talk at SXSW Interactive this week. How AI is incorporated into a company's operations will in turn affect how a company is structured as jobs change. At the same time, whole new industries will be created, which offer huge opportunities for those who are ready, Frank said. AI was one of the hottest topics at SXSW Interactive this year, with speakers speculating about the jobs it will end--and spawn, as well as the business opportunities it will create, and the HAL-like dangers it will pose.

Austin's South by Southwest is historically known as a music showcase, yet the Interactive portion of the conference is now the biggest draw for tens of thousands of attendees who come from across the globe. Alan Melson, KERA's VP of Digital, has been writing about the conference this weekend. I spoke with him about what's on tech folks' minds. Alan, it seems like every year there are several recurring themes that emerge from South By Southwest Interactive. What seems to be bubbling up this year?

Thousands have flooded into Austin, Texas to experience the 31st Annual South by Southwest Convention and Festivals. Check out some of the sights and sounds from the first day. Osaka University roboticist Hiroshi Ishiguro returned SXSW, this time bringing two robots, shown at left. Don't be too concerned about the rise of humanoid robots, because they're still not ready for prime time. But you might want to keep a wary eye on the machine-learning systems that power them.

When it was founded 31 years ago, South by Southwest was easier to define: It was an annual musical showcase linking up-and-coming recording artists with industry executives in Austin, Texas, a city known for its vibrant music scene, cultural eccentricity and barbecue. But over the years, the South by Southwest Conference and Festivals has grown into a massive annual series of citywide events touching on music, film, media and technology. SXSW, as it's known, now includes a trade show, a job fair, an education-themed conference and throughout innovators will have opportunities to pitch their ideas to potential financial backers. The annual 10-day event, which begins Friday with a keynote address from Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., has ballooned into an gathering so large that in recent years city officials have curbed the number of special musical events. And some music journalists have criticized the annual event for becoming too big and commercialized to be a place for musical discovery.

The annual South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival, held in Austin last week, is an incubator of cutting-edge technologies and digital creativity and has become the place to discover the technology of tomorrow today."[1] This year, conversations around SXSW Interactive have been dominated by mobile apps, virtual reality, 3D printing, the internet of things, artificial intelligence and security but there are 3 areas that are beginning to gather real pace are set to have a profound effect on our industry. Fear of a robofuture was prevalent at SXSW, with apprehensions about how humanoid machines, artificial intelligence and deep learning will impact our future. John Havens, founder of The H(app)athon Project, went as far as to run a session called "The Dispensables", pointing to Gartner research predicting that 1/3 of all Americans will be out of jobs by 2025 due to automation. Dr Ishiguro suggested that both the home computer and ubiquity of smartphones have paved the way for more futuristic applications, including personal robots and digital retail assistants that can help customers with their clothes shopping.

The annual South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival, held in Austin, Texas, is an incubator of cutting-edge technologies and digital creativity, featuring a trade show, startup accelerator, innovation awards and speaking events with industry leaders. "From hands-on training to big-picture analysis of the future, SXSW Interactive has become the place to discover the technology of tomorrow today."[1] This year, conversations around SXSW Interactive have been dominated by mobile apps, virtual reality, 3D printing, the internet of things, artificial intelligence and security. We've chosen to focus on 3 areas that we believe will have the most profound effect on customer experience: Fear of a robofuture was prevalent at SXSW, with apprehensions about how humanoid machines, artificial intelligence and deep learning will impact our future. John Havens, founder of The H(app)athon Project, went as far as to run a session called "The Dispensables", pointing to Gartner research predicting that 1/3 of all Americans will be out of jobs by 2025 due to automation.