Martech 2017: The four biggest trends so far this year

The biggest problem with year-end reviews is that, at least in marketing technology, a year can be a lifetime. So, to give you a head start on digesting this year of turmoil, here's a half-time review of this year's biggest trends. As of midsummer, I see four big buckets of trends-in-progress: Intelligence, Transparency, The Experience and Going Beyond Computers. Not only is every tool and platform getting way smarter, it's almost at the point where this new level of smartness isn't news anymore. Almost every self-respecting vendor is adding artificial intelligence (AI) to its resume these days, largely built around machine learning's pattern recognition and predictive analytics' projection of those patterns into the future.