Artificial intelligence (AI) will mediate with brands on behalf of consumers, and people will form personal relationships with AI. "I think within the next five years, we're going to have'personal AI' that live with us, and understand us, and make decisions for us - and interact on our behalf with brands," said Australian futurist, Liesl Yearsley, CEO and founder of Akin.com, a US-based company that aims to humanise AI. It's all part of a future where consumers have more "personal AI" experiences to help them in their daily lives, Yearsley told a CeBIT crowd as she details how artificial intelligence is impacting society, enterprise and individuals. "AI will solve more and more complex problems. We will form relationships with them. And we will hand over decisions and, theoretically, we may start to merge with them," she predicted.

One day last summer, Microsoft's director of artificial intelligence research, Eric Horvitz, activated the Autopilot function of his Tesla sedan. The car steered itself down a curving road near Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Washington, freeing his mind to better focus on a call with a nonprofit he had cofounded around the ethics and governance of AI. Then, he says, Tesla's algorithms let him down. "The car didn't center itself exactly right," Horvitz recalls. Both tires on the driver's side of the vehicle nicked a raised yellow curb marking the center line, and shredded.

One day last summer, Microsoft's director of artificial intelligence research, Eric Horvitz, activated the Autopilot function of his Tesla sedan. The car steered itself down a curving road near Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Washington, freeing his mind to better focus on a call with a nonprofit he had cofounded around the ethics and governance of AI. Then, he says, Tesla's algorithms let him down. "The car didn't center itself exactly right," Horvitz recalls. Both tires on the driver's side of the vehicle nicked a raised yellow curb marking the center line, and shredded.

Speaking on a panel at Dreamforce in San Francisco, Paul Daugherty said he believed there was "tremendous substance" behind the hype around AI. "We've never seen a technology that's moved as fast as AI has to impact business and society," Daugherty said. "We believe this is by far the fastest-moving technology we've ever tracked, and we're just getting started." He referred to research that the consultancy giant recently carried out alongside Frontier Economics that suggested AI could deliver a 38% improvement in worker productivity by 2035, and add between $15tn (£11.4tn) and $20tn to the economic output of the world's 12 largest economies. Daugherty argued that the narrative of AI replacing human jobs was given too much emphasis. "It's easy to see jobs that are eliminated, such as long-haul truck drivers," he said.

An article for the MIT Technology Review has raised concerns about the potential for our intimacy with artificial intelligence (AI) to be exploited for insidious ends. Its author, Liesl Yearsley, shares her perspective as the former CEO of Cognea, which built virtual agents using a mixture of structured and deep learning. Yearsley observed during her tenure at Cognea that humans were becoming more and more dependent on AI not just to perform tasks, but also to provide emotional and platonic support. "This phenomenon occurred regardless of whether the agent was designed to act as a personal banker, a companion, or a fitness coach" Yearsley wrote -- people would volunteer secrets, dreams, and even details of their love lives. This may not necessarily be bad.