Forrester: Marketing and sales lead nearly 50% of AI initiatives

While AI initiatives such as IBM Watson, chatbots and digital assistants have garnered much attention over the past year, the current applications only scratch the surface of the technology's potential. For companies, AI will be used to predict customer needs in near real-time, helping them retain customers. The importance of AI to customer interactions is reflected in Forrester's findings, such as that 37% of companies plan to implement intelligent assistants in the next 12 months, and 35% have their sights on cognitive product launches for customers. Some of the other ways AI will be used going forward include leveraging speech recognition for customer interactions, machine learning for making predictions, image recognition in combination with machine learning, robotics and self-driving cars. Already this year, there are signs that robots in stores could revolutionize the customer experience. However, because AI comes with a number of ethical, political and social issues attached, it will be important for companies to develop a plan and have foundational elements in place as they test and learn, per Forrester.