Content curation, sentiment analysis, predictive customer service, and optimal ad targeting are among multiple examples of where AI is already impacting marketing. Our expectations of how AI can radically transform marketing in coming few years is nothing short of mind blowing. Billions of web pages and social media posts supplementing CRM data will provide a 360-degree view of each customer. This will enable hyper personalized marketing in which an AI-driven business concierge delivers end-to-end curated buying experiences tailored to each individual customer. These scenarios are based on emerging practice and trends, and therefore completely realistic, but they mask the anxiety about the possible downside of AI's increasing role in marketing.

Cleo, the London-based FinTech startup, got a recent boost in its angel investing round from Skype Founder Niklas Zennström. Cleo has created an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot program that works with users to manage their finances. To date, Cleo has received $700,000 in funding from eight angel investors, including the recent contribution from Zennström. Users seeking financial advice can currently access Cleo via multiple channels, including the chatbot's mobile app, Facebook Messenger, as well as through AI-assistant integrations with Amazon's Alexa and Google Home. Barney Hussey-Yeo, Cleo's cofounder and CEO, was quoted by TechCrunch as saying: "We're trying to reduce the complexity and increase the transparency of financial services for our generation. Cleo's an AI financial assistant that makes managing your money incredibly simple. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, you can ask Cleo nearly anything about your finances."

As it goes every year, one hot feature sets a trend in technology, and suddenly every company boasts some variation of which that is uniquely theirs. This year, that feature is AI. Hot on the heels of Alexa's and Google Assistant's holiday successes, Artificial Intelligence on phones has become the de facto must-have feature – whether consumers know it or not. In any case, manufacturers seem not to realize that AI doesn't mean "Anything Intuitive" – that's just how operating systems are supposed to be. Yet it seems that OEM's are eager to label nearly any vaguely intuitive feature as AI.

Machine learning has long powered many products we interact with daily–from "intelligent" assistants like Apple's Siri and Google now, to recommendation engines like Amazon's that suggest new products to buy, to the ad ranking systems used by Google and Facebook. More recently, machine learning has entered the public consciousness because of advances in "deep learning"–these include AlphaGo's defeat of Go grandmaster Lee Sedol and impressive new products around image recognition and machine translation. In this series, we'll give an introduction to some powerful but generally applicable techniques in machine learning. These include deep learning but also more traditional methods that are often all the modern business needs. After reading the articles in the series, you should have the knowledge necessary to embark on concrete machine learning experiments in a variety of areas on your own.

Christina is audience development editor. After graduating from the University of Nottingham reading philosophy and theology in 2013, Christina joined a tech start-up specialising in mobile apps. She has a keen interest in the mobile platform and innovative tech. In recent years AI has brought us some pretty impressive and widely used tech, from the image recognition being used by Facebook to speech recognition technology at work in Amazon's Alexa or Apple's Siri. It's these breakthroughs in deep learning and neural networks that have led to some of the most exciting yet also worrying times in tech. Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Bill Gates (to name a few) have all warned us about the dangers of unregulated AI development.

While AI is having significant impact with the consumer market -- witness the explosion of AI-driven bots and digital assistants -- businesses are realizing the important ways they can take advantage of AI. One of the biggest areas of growth is in AI Marketing (AIM). Start with the fact that computers are great at crunching numbers, quickly providing results from complex math formulas, and handling repetitive tasks without complaint. Add in software that uses well-designed machine-learning algorithms, and you have the potential of a powerful AIM process to deliver detailed analytics and offer valuable insights. AIM software will revolutionize the role of the marketer -- for the better.

The internet strongly agrees there's an artificial intelligence (AI) revolution going on, and it's come to pharma marketing. IBM Watson, the AI brain being infused all over healthcare, will form the backend of an interactive display ad for GSK Consumer Healthcare's Theraflu. The cold-and-flu product was one of seven brands, across four beta partners, to sign on with Watson Ads, an initiative announced this past summer by the Weather Co. -- an IBM property -- aiming to develop a new wave of ads that people will be able to communicate with. According to the firm, it marks the first consumer use of IBM's cognitive technology for advertising. "This is a whole new foray into marketing," says D. J. Reali, SVP, national ad sales for the Weather Co.

The thought of handing important parts of your business over to artificial intelligence can seem rather scary and alarming, but many businesses are discovering that it's not as challenging as they first believed. In fact, A.I. technology is allowing thousands of businesses to save the one thing they can't get back: time. When people look back at the span of time between 2015 and 2020, they'll likely recognize this window as an important catalyst in the technological revolution that bred powerful applications that would transform life for years to come. At the heart of this revolution is A.I. And while products of A.I. are finally coming to fruition, it's not exactly a brand-new idea.

We are entering the age of the CUI, the conversational user interface. Already, there are 8.2 million voice-first devices in homes, mostly Amazon Echos. By the end of this year, that number will balloon to 33 million. That's the prediction from VoiceLabs, a startup that helps companies monitor and measure people's interaction with their Alexa Skills or Google Actions. Skills and actions are integration points between Alexa or Google Assistant and your technology; they are the conversational user interface equivalent of apps on Android or iOS smartphones.

Do you wonder how Internet of Things Will Affect Your Social Media Strategy? What part does Artificial Intelligence and Technology Play in Social Media? It all may sound like a sci-fi movie at first, but this is real life. New technologies are shaping the world we live in and at a rapid pace. Here's a quick guide to help you understand some of these emerging technologies and how they will affect social media.