I use Alexa at home and it is just great for playing music. At the moment I haven't got it set up well for things like surfing the net and watching films , but if I could choose a film as easily as choosing music I would definitely use it. This is not a crutch for me  this is something that allows me to play music I wouldn't otherwise be able to find in my music collection.

I think its quite a few years away from being useful at work - it can only handle simple commands and to be truthful I can only handle saying simple commands.

Work often consists of complicated iterative instruction sets which is aided with things like intellisense - I think these systems are still probably tens of years away from something like that. For my own area of expertise I would be unlikely to use an expert system. For areas that I am not expert in... probably would - a doctor medical expert system yes definitely would use them.

In my work I can see lots of specific uses for things like AI with regard to some very simple massive repetitive tasks which we just don't do at the moment because we don't have the manpower and no one with sufficient knowledge has really decided to take a look at them yet. I can think of digitising things like buildings from aerial photos would be really good for instance. I know quite a few individuals are experimenting with this at the moment. and given the steps forward with driving I think it could be solved today (google maps have got to be working on this already)

I have written my own personal applications which help me with things like notes on projects, people that I come in contact with and deadlines- I don't doubt that these are very much repeats of some of the applications that are available in the market place BUT I like the ability to personalize mine plus they are learning devices something which is important to me. I regularly choose the hard way of doing especially when starting a new topic because if I do need to hire in help it gives me a much better idea of what is and isn't good value.