AI assistants help make sales teams more efficient, freeing up human power to increase the bottom line. Bots can be more successful than human counterparts at weeding out dead-end leads. Experts say jobs in retail sales will most likely be computerized in coming years."You sound cute, got a picture?""Nicole, your [sic] beautiful, are you single?""I love you, Jen."Those may sound like messages f...

Automated technologies could have a big impact on 60% of Wall Street jobs, according to a new report by McKinsey, the consulting firm.Integration of new technology doesn't guarantee big revenue spikes, but it is necessary to keep firms afloat in the digital age. Some big firms are already taking action. The robots are coming for Wall Street's jobs, and McKinsey & Co has an idea of exactly w...

Indoor vertical farming company Plenty has raised $200 million in a Series B round of funding, the largest agtech investment to date. Just one month after the grower acquired indoor agriculture hardware company Bright Agrotech, this round was led by Japan’s SoftBank Vision Fund, a $93 billion, multi-stage tech fund.Affiliates of Louis M. Bacon, the founder of Moore Capital Management, also joi...

Lenovo has been sharing some of its visions of the future at its annual Tech World Innovation summit in Shanghai. If the next generation augmented reality, digital assistant and health monitoring concepts are any indication, the company is getting ready to move beyond its usual remit of laptops and smartphones.First up is the Lenovo DaystAR augmented reality (AR) headset, which has all the proc...

Today’s infographic comes from Brian Solis and JESS3, and it visualizes the massive social media universe of 2017. Make sure to view the full-size version of the graphic for the best experience.[click to enlarge]It’s hard to believe that social media has emerged as such an expansive ecosystem in just the last 10 years.The incredible growth of this social media universe can be largely attribut...

Audi and Fraunhofer have teamed up to look into the way people will use self-driving interiors.Self-driving technology promises to dramatically change the way we interact with our cars, and in ways we're not entirely sure of yet. Audi has teamed up with the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering to explore how people will spend their time in autonomous cars, and how manufacturers can b...

Opinion: About one-fifth—or 3.2 million—of U.S. freelancers are making at least $100,000 per year.The corner office overlooking Madison Avenue used to be the symbol of career success. But a new corner office—the in-home office—is on the rise, representing not only financial success, but that mythical ideal so many professionals crave and strive for: work-life balance.About one-fifth—or 3.2...

The Mira Prism is the Cardboard of Augmented Reality. Remember when the Oculus Rift was announced?? We went crazy at the prospect, however the biggest breakthrough for us, the consumer, came when Google announced the Cardboard, a makeshift device that used your phone (the very gadget in your pocket right now!) as a medium to view VR content. The cardboard spawned millions of copies, in paper, p...

Millennials are outspending their older peers at restaurants, new credit card spending data from Bank of America Merrill Lynch shows.“All four demographic groups spend about the same amount of their spending basket on food,” analysts at the bank said in a note out Wednesday. “But Millennials concentrate more of their spending at restaurants while the other three cohorts spend more at grocery...

Through machine learning and image analysis, Trax aims to help retailers create the perfect “shelf” and optimise their operations for better sales.Trax, a computer vision and retail intelligence company headquartered in Singapore, has closed a US$64 million funding round led by an affiliate of Warburg Pincus LLC, a private equity firm focussed on growth investing. This capital infusion makes...