IDC: Human creativity will be vital to how marketers successfully use AI

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.