JOBS GIRL FRIDAYS WON'T DO:

One of the advantages that CEOs and celebrities have over most people is that they don't need to spend much time handling the uninteresting, time-consuming aspects of daily life: scheduling appointments, making travel plans, searching for the information they want. They have personal assistants, or PAs, who handle such things. But soon--maybe even this year--most of us will be able to afford this luxury for the price of few lattes a month, thanks to the emergence of an open AI ecosystem.

AI here refers, of course, to artificial intelligence. Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana, Google's OK Google and Amazon's Echo services are nifty in the way that they extract questions from speech using natural-language processing and then do a limited set of useful things, such as look for a restaurant, get driving directions, find an open slot for a meeting, or run a simple web search. But too often their response to a request for help is "Sorry, I don't know about that" or "here's what I found on the web." You would never confuse these digital assistants for a human PA. Moreover, these systems are proprietary and hard for entrepreneurs to extend with new features.

But over the past several years, several pieces of emerging technology have linked together in ways that make it easier to build far more powerful, human-like digital assistants--that is, into an open AI ecosystem. This ecosystem connects not only to our mobile devices and computers--and through them to our messages, contacts, finances, calendars and work files--but also to the thermostat in the bedroom, the scale in the bathroom, the bracelet on the wrist, even the car in the driveway. The interconnection of the Internet with the Internet of Things and your own personal data, all instantly available almost anywhere via spoken conversations with an AI, could unlock higher productivity and better health and happiness for millions of people within the next few years.

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