If a picture is worth a thousand words imagine how valuable a video is – especially a 1-hour video – and Instagram recently shocked the tech world by rolling out IGTV, which couldn’t have come at a better time. This is a drastic shift for the platform but one that’s definitely headed in the right direction.

Large companies throughout the world rely on a wide variety of data being ingested then correlated to produce insights that guide business decisions, but many forget to realize that social media is often where news first breaks and trends can be spotted early on. Above and beyond that, there’s a galaxy of social media insights you never knew existed.

Over the years the rivalry between search engines has been fierce with Google clearly leading the pack, but Microsoft’s recent investment in deep learning and collaboration with Intel to improve the capabilities of Bing is very promising.

Social media is like a tap of golden data that when opened can unlock a wide variety of value for organizations ranging from discovering trends that impact shipping and logistics or complaints that directly indicate hardware or infrastructure issues. Social media is becoming so much more than a medium to communicate and will play a critical role in guiding businesses in the future, especially since technologies used to analyze social conversations have been revolutionized over the past couple of years.

If you are in high school or college and have heard all of the buzz around Artificial Intelligence, also known as AI, there’s a good chance you’re intrigued by the technology and have considered taking courses or maybe even getting a degree in AI whether it’s machine learning, deep learning or other subsets of the field. And if you haven’t considered it, you must!

If you don’t live under a rock you’re probably familiar with (and hopefully a fan of) The X-Files, and in a recent episode, titled “Rm9sbG93ZXJz,” common fears of artificial intelligence (AI) were brought to light beginning with a dark yet true story about Microsoft’s AI chatbot that launched in 2016. “Tay” was designed as an experiment to better understand how humans interact on social media but quickly became offensive, racist, and hateful, which led to her complete shutdown.

Dating back to the 1950s scientists have been intrigued by creating artificial intelligence (AI) solutions that mimic the human brain, however mythical it may sound, and today we are living in a time when something you’d typically see in a Hollywood movie has actually come to life. And it’s a beautiful thing.

Since we began this journey back in 2013 the Soteria Intelligence website has gone through a variety of iterations, and we are excited to announce our new look and feel.

We are excited to announce the expansion of Soteria Intelligence’s team with John Mutch coming aboard as Executive Chairman where he will use his 30-years of experience in the technology space to guide company growth, including expanding into new verticals as well as the development of new machine learning solutions. A new adventure begins!

With most things in life there’s a learning curve whether it be riding a bicycle or becoming a lawyer, and there’s a point where the haziness subsides, the sun comes out, and you can bask in clarity. After studying social media for the past 15 years, which has been both a challenge and an adventure, it’s exciting for me to be using that experience to lead the Soteria Intelligence team. Here’s what I learned over time.