If you've ever led a team at work before, you know how hard it can be to keep people motivated. But one Japanese startup is using technology to make that easier than ever. The Tokyo-based company Attuned offers what it calls "predictive HR analytics" to help companies understand what makes each of their employees tick. And companies in Japan are paying thousands of dollars for the chance to get a better read on their workers. It's a simple process: When a company signs on with Attuned, its employees take a 55-question online test in which they're presented with pairs of statements, such as "Planning my day in advance gives me a sense of security," and "I prefer to be able to decide which task to focus on at any given time."

As marketers, we need to battle now like never before to catch our customer's attention. The average person in the US goes through more than 6 hours each day interacting with some kind of digital media. With ever growing interplay over the variety of digital platforms comes a diminishing customer attention span. Doubtlessly, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is a testing job to fill. A year ago, we witnessed a portion of the world's greatest marketers cut digital advertising spending by over $100 million, which saw no impact on sales development.

"Today, AI augments what we do, but in the future you'll see decisions made by (AI) entities," said Bernt Wahl, executive director of the Brain Machine Consortium. Wahl argues a logical progression of technological advances will result in smarter, more proactive AI systems. "With the web we created all these search engines and collected all this information," said Wahl, adding that systems like IBM's Watson now help determine whether all that information being collected is accurate. "In the future we'll have a'wisdom engine' that can take the knowledge we know is accurate and make decisions based on that,' he said. Jack Berkowitz, vice president of products and data science for Oracle's Adaptive Intelligence effort said AI has proven useful in helping companies filter the massive amounts of new data they're accumulating. "We call our program adaptive intelligence because it's about learning and adaptation and keeping pace," said Berkowitz. "Companies that try to keep up using the kind of rules-based systems we've had for years won't be able to.

The idea of artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for decades, and from movies to games, has now found a home in the mainstream. We are not yet at the point where computers are starting to plot the overthrow of humanity, but through AI, computers are beginning to understand our fellow human beings better than we may understand ourselves. At least, advertising and marketing platforms that integrate AI into their processes are crunching numbers much faster than we ever could, and deriving insights that marketers use to better target and understand the end user and consumer. Starting simple with AI technologies, there are recommendation engines: "Early low-hanging fruit for brands to harness the power of AI is in content discovery," Glenn Hower, senior analyst at Parks Associates, told attendees at the "A.I. Meets Media: Innovation Summit" presented by Ooyala.

The White House was placed on lockdown Tuesday morning after a man reportedly approached the grounds and claimed to have a bomb. The Secret Service announced on its official Twitter feed that it was investigating a suspicious package on the White House's North Lawn, while reporters were cordoned off in the Press Room. The Secret Service confirmed it had a suspect in custody and that its probe was ongoing. The so far unidentified man, who had a warrant out for his arrest before Tuesday's incident, was taken into custody. The Secret Service reportedly deployed a "bomb robot" to investigate the package and set up a security perimeter.