Deep learning and the widespread availability of extremely powerful computing clusters will make it possible to implement services and APIs (software agents) with increasing degrees of intelligence. There is so much profit to be made in creating smart agents that understand some aspects of the world, the incentives are so large, that it's almost inevitable that tech companies will begin throwing hundreds of billions of dollars at the machine learning field, and progress is going to happen very rapidly. Without sentience ever coming into the picture, these intelligent agents are going to be able to make connections individual humans beings can't realistically make.