In the 1960s, the Star Trek television series brought the vision of artificial intelligence into the living rooms of millions of people. AI was everywhere in the show, in the form of machines that had all the intelligence of humans -- and a lot more. Take, for example, the universal translator on the USS Enterprise. It could translate alien languages into English or any other language instantaneously. That, of course, was all science fiction back in the days when Lyndon B. Johnson was the U.S. president, as were a lot of the other AI applications in use on the starship.

Splunk on Tuesday outlined new versions of its flagship suites with an emphasis on machine learning advances. Since late 2014, the BetterWorks team has been building data infrastructures to develop the employee's "work profile"--called the BetterWorks Work Graph --informed by everything related to an employee's work. The Work Graph collects data on the work and performance relationships of an employee available in the BetterWorks platform, including goal alignment, organization chart, cross-functional goals and teams, comments, data from integrated key results, recognition hashtags and more. Microsoft has announced several new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered features for Office 365 and Dynamics 365 for Sales. Machine learning is bringing data analysis into a new era, allowing companies to use predictive analytics that continually "learn" from historical data.