Power to the people: The rise of virtual personal assistants

Progress: Current virtual personal assistants are relatively limited, but advances are taking place rapidly. Pictured is Google Now, a popular virtual personal assistant.

Managing an online persona takes time and many individuals struggle to manage the task themselves. Online persona managers, what Gartner defines as virtual personal assistants, are emerging as a solution for how consumers will not only keep their data private, but also increase its value.

For most of the current agent technologies, virtual personal assistants already track the location of the user, as well as their contacts, calendar entries, social media posts and Twitter feeds, and gather the websites, text messages and e-mails associated with the individual.