artificial intelligence in marketing

The simplest way to understand artificial intelligence is to think about it as a set of technologies and algorithms that are designed to make machines smart, to give them humanlike capabilities (e.g. vision, hearing, speech, writing, understanding, movement).

The Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference (MAICON) agenda is now live featuring 40+ sessions and 60+ speakers over three days, July 16 - 18, 2019 in Cleveland, Ohio. MAICON includes five interactive workshops and 37 general and breakout sessions—all developed to help marketers understand, pilot and successfully scale artificial intelligence. Presenters will explore the next frontier in digital marketing transformation, covering topics such as: advertising, analytics, content marketing, email marketing, ethics, robotics, sales, strategy, voice and more.

If you follow the money, sales and marketing technology is trending toward a much more intelligent future. According to analysis of Crunchbase data, there are 1,141 companies that fit into the category groups of both “Sales and Marketing” and “Artificial Intelligence.” These are predominantly software companies selling sales and marketing solutions, of which 488* have raised funding totaling more than $5.2 billion (in USD).

I’ve attended and presented at hundreds of conferences in my nearly (gulp) 20 years in the industry, but, this is my first time on the event organizer side as we build the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Conference (MAICON). And, like every event I’ve been to, we see the diversity and quality of the speakers as the fundamental building block of a great attendee experience.

How much will artificial intelligence (AI) impact your job as a marketer in the next two years? Probably way more than you think. From audience targeting, to content strategy, to SEO, media buying, email writing, and predicting conversions and churn, hundreds of activities marketers perform every day will be intelligently automated to some degree in the near future.

Gartner and McKinsey Global Institute forecast trillions of dollars in annual impact from artificial intelligence, yet most marketers still struggle to understand what AI is and how to pilot it in their organizations. A recent research project from MIT Sloan Management Review and The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) analyzed AI adoption based on a global survey of 3,076 business executives. The report—Artificial Intelligence in Business Gets Real: Pioneering Companies Aim for AI Scale—broke responding companies into four groups: