Human creativity will be key to avoiding the diminishing returns of technology and data as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning become an everyday part of our marketing lives. That's the view of IDC research director, Gerry Murray, who took to the stage as the keynote of CMO and CIO's recent Executive Connections events in Melbourne and Sydney to share how AI use cases are starting to proliferate across the marketing and customer engagement sphere. Importantly, he also discussed what marketing and technology leaders should be doing to realise their potential. As Murray pointed out, AI is going into every single marketing tool out there today, and he noted more than 80 use cases identified by IDC as part of recent research. These stretch from virtual sales reps and social sentiment analysis, through to lead scoring, AI-powered content marketing, chatbots, recommendation engines and attribution analysis.

What's the purpose of humanity if machines can learn ingenuity? The value placed on creativity in modern times has led to a range of writers and thinkers trying to articulate what it is, how to stimulate it, and why it is important. It was while sitting on a committee at the Royal Society assessing what impact machine learning was likely to have on society in the coming decades that I first encountered the theories of Margaret Boden. Her ideas struck me as the most relevant when it came to addressing creativity in machines. Boden is an original thinker who has managed to fuse many disciplines: philosopher, psychologist, physician, AI expert and cognitive scientist. In her eighties now, with white hair flying like sparks and an ever active brain, she is enjoying engaging enthusiastically with the prospect of what these "tin cans", as she likes to call computers, might be capable of. To this end, she has identified three different types of human creativity.Exploratory creativity involves taking what is there and exploring its outer edges, extending the limits of what is possible while remaining bound by the rules.

To the editor: I first saw Andre Previn at the Hollywood Bowl in 1965, and it was love at first sight. I remember going backstage after the concert, where it was crowded with movie stars -- but the autograph I wanted was Previn's. I still have the album of his jazz variations on the "My Fair Lady" score that he signed for me so many years ago. I saw Previn many times at the Hollywood Bowl after that, especially while he was music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the late 1980s. I remember so well Previn conducting Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2, Grieg's Piano Concerto in A minor and Gershwin's Concerto in F from the keyboard.

Microsoft has announced two new cloud services to help administrators detect and manage threats to their systems. The first, Azure Sentinel, is very much in line with other cloud services: it's dependent on machine learning to sift through vast amounts of data to find a signal among all the noise. The second, Microsoft Threat Experts, is a little different: it's powered by humans, not machines. Azure Sentinel is a machine learning-based Security Information and Event Management that takes the (often overwhelming) stream of security events--a bad password, a failed attempt to elevate privileges, an unusual executable that's blocked by anti-malware, and so on--and distinguishes between important events that actually deserve investigation and mundane events that can likely be ignored. Sentinel can use a range of data sources.

Fifteen years ago I came to Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley, to do a documentary on outsourcing. One of our first stops was a company called 24/7 whose main business was answering customer service calls and selling products, like credit cards, for U.S. companies half a world away. The beating heart of 24/7 back then was a vast floor of young phone operators, most with only high school degrees, save for a small pool of techies who provided "help desk" advice. These young Indians spoke in the best American English, perfected in a class that we filmed, where everyone had to practice enunciating "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers" -- and make it sound like they were from Kansas not Kolkata. The operations floor was so noisy from hundreds of simultaneous phone conversations that 24/7 installed a white-noise machine to muffle the din, but even then you could still occasionally hear piercing through the cacophony some techie saying to someone in America, the likes of: "What, Ma'am? Your computer is on fire?"

There are many, many examples of AI failures -- often problems rooted in a lack of expert human training. Remember in 2016, when Facebook Messenger opened up its platform for developers to create custom chatbots? It spurred a digital gold rush because thousands of businesses couldn't resist the chance to reach the 1.3 million active Messenger users. The problem was that excited users expected intelligent interactions. And these bots mostly failed to deliver on those expectations.

Kelly believes AI will never end up amounting to human creativity -- and worries that by placing less and less importance on the role of creativity, we risk substituting "machine creativity" for our own. "Human creative achievement, because of the way it is socially embedded, will not succumb to advances in artificial intelligence," he wrote. "To say otherwise is to misunderstand both what human beings are and what our creativity amounts to." Once robots learn to think for themselves, independent from human influence -- and Kelly believes that's still many years out -- the paradigms may shift.

On March 31, 1913, in the Great Hall of the Musikverein concert house in Vienna, a riot broke out in the middle of a performance of an orchestral song by Alban Berg. Police arrested the concert's organizer for punching Oscar Straus, a little-remembered composer of operettas. Later, at the trial, Straus quipped about the audience's frustration. The punch, he insisted, was the most harmonious sound of the entire evening. History has rendered a different verdict: the concert's conductor, Arnold Schoenberg, has gone down as perhaps the most creative and influential composer of the 20th century. You may not enjoy Schoenberg's dissonant music, which rejects conventional tonality to arrange the 12 notes of the scale according to rules that don't let any predominate. But he changed what humans understand music to be. This is what makes him a genuinely creative and innovative artist.

It offered'queue-less shopping' – a self-service concept that allowed consumers to shop the store by pushing a metal trolley around the aisles rather than waiting in line at a counter to be served. Today, retailers are becoming increasingly reliant on customer experience innovations such as this to ensure their continuity, as the industry is entering the most transformational period of its experience in response to the current crisis hitting the UK high street. Already a disruptor with its convenience-focused online retail service, Amazon redoubled its efforts to disrupt brick-and-mortar retail outlets by launching its own physical store, Amazon Go, in 2016. By and large, Amazon Go resembled any other supermarket: products on shelves, arranged by aisles; an assortment of baskets and trolleys for transporting goods; and a bright, fresh, welcoming atmosphere to attract customers. It's revolutionary move, however, was to use intelligent innovations in IoT technology to provide the most convenient shopping experience yet.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is all the rage these days. A recent article noted that'robots' -- shorthand for AI in the tabloids -- will be able to write a fiction bestseller within 50 years. I suppose that would be shocking to me as a novelist if most fiction bestsellers were not already being written by'robots'. Or so one feels, keeping publishing and other vogues in mind: a bit of this, a bit of that, a dash of something else, and voila, you have a bestseller! In that sense, perhaps the rise of AI will make us reconsider what we mean by human intelligence.