Content marketing—the use of intrinsically valuable articles, videos images and more as a way to market a company’s products and services—is still one of the most popular forms of advertising for 2017, according to a survey of 500 top advertisers titled “The State of Digital Advertising 2017” (www.clickz.com/reports/the-state-of-digital-advertising-2017).

Given that 61% of businesses reported that they’d been hit by ransomware in 2016 (https://cyber-edge.com/cdr), getting your act together on a backup plan for your systems and data has never been more imperative.

While it’ll be awhile before we can all have an IBM Watson supercomputer sitting atop our desktops, there are a number of artificial intelligence (AI) business tools you can use right now that will help you run smarter, faster and ahead of the competition. Essentially, these next-generation wonders tap into artificial intelligence’s ability to do a lot of the thinking and strategizing for you.

While chatbots—computer programs that conduct conversations via audio or text—have captured the imaginations of businesses hungry to automate conversations on the web, it will still be a while before any “digital friend” inside your computer can truly mimic human conversation. Even so, businesses which ignore chatbots do so at their peril, given that there is a great deal of money betting chatbots will emerge, sooner or later, as conversational charmers.