Man versus machine

Artificial intelligence is evolving from streamlining routine tasks to enabling marketing, sales and workplace automation. Has its day finally come? Alex Meehan reports

David Russell, chief executive, Host Ireland

When Alan Turing first conceived of his famous test in 1950, he anticipated that computer technology of the future would advance enough that to all intents and purposes a computer could pass for a person.

And while that day hasn’t quite arrived, interacting with some of the chatbots deployed on the web today is certainly an impressive experience. Log on to the websites or Facebook pages of major online ...