As guests mingled among the appetizers and food at Accenture's Technology Vision event last month in San Francisco, California, jazz music played in the background. The band improvised a number of classic standards, which was noteworthy because one of the players was Shimon, a robot, and it was playing a mean marimba. The presence of a jazz-playing robot was fitting because the theme of the evening was the intersection of human and machine, highlighting the release of Accenture PLC's "Technology Vision 2018" report. It documented the need for enterprises to fully understand emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality and cloud computing. The robot's musical accompaniment offered yet another example of civilization's inexorable march to a world where machines are part of daily life, doing just about everything humans can do in real time.

Your contact center is very likely one of your top strategic priorities for your business. But there are many problems faced by these centers. Luckily, you can use virtual technology, like AI and machine learning, to not only identify the root cause of your problems but to solve them. A white paper by customer engagement company [24]7 looked at the most common and costly problems taking place in contact centers. It also demonstrated how solving just one problem, the root cause of all the other problems, could have a positive, trickle down impact on the others.

In the advertising and marketing industry, event marketing has proved to be the fastest growing approach. Event marketers have adopted various new methods of marketing today, and video or live streaming is perhaps the trend which organizations are embracing willingly and promptly. Sharat Saran, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at ON24, analyzes the shape of things to come, "Following from its rise in 2016, next year we'll start to see marketers in both the B2B and B2C worlds really leverage live video for their initiatives – particularly those types of solutions that can provide tangible insights and data on the back end. Video had long been a black hole for data – where you don't know how long someone watched and what they engaged in – but the latest technology shifts make it a gold mine of stats. Savvy marketers will make the move to glean invaluable intelligence from this channel, and helping transform how they engage with consumers."