At many firms, the marketing function is rapidly embracing artificial intelligence. But in order to fully realize the technology's enormous potential, chief marketing officers must understand the various types of applications--and how they might evolve. Classifying AI by its intelligence level (whether it is simple task automation or uses advanced machine learning) and structure (whether it is a stand-alone application or is integrated into larger platforms) can help firms plan which technologies to pursue and when. Companies should take a stepped approach, starting with rule-based, stand-alone applications that help employees make better decisions, and over time deploying more-sophisticated and integrated AI systems in customer-facing situations. Of all a company's functions, marketing has perhaps the most to gain from artificial intelligence.

For the baby boomer generation and Gen Xers, the goal was to go to a traditional university, receive an education, and then find employment with an established organization they could work with for the rest of their lives. Millennials and generation Z seem less set on traditional university training. They definitely value higher education, but they are looking for alternative ways to receive said education. If they can get a degree without relying on a full time on-campus program, they will opt for that more times than not. As the expense associated with higher education continues to rise, it seems like it attracts more students to distance learning.

This is the first in a three-part series. In the already fast-changing world of HR, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is creating unimagined twists and turns as 2020 progresses, leading to unprecedented attention on HR technology to help employers manage these new challenges. No emerging technology arguably has had more impact on the evolution and refinement of the pandemic workplace than artificial intelligence--which is expected to continue in the months and years ahead. One HR area that has benefited the most from AI-based solutions is workforce management, mainly in recruiting for employers whose business sectors continued to thrive, or in managing challenges such as furloughs and layoffs for the sectors hit hardest by COVID-19. According to Greg Moran, CEO at OutMatch, a SaaS-based talent intelligence platform, the movement toward HR digitization, with the use of AI and machine learning, was already well underway at the start of the year.

Andrew Ng is a soft-spoken AI researcher whose online postings talk loudly. A March blog post in which the Stanford professor announced he was leaving Chinese search engine Baidu temporarily wiped more than a billion dollars off the company's value. A June tweet about a new Ng website, Deeplearning.ai, Today that speculation is over. Deeplearning.ai is home to a series of online courses Ng says will help spread the benefits of recent advances in machine learning far beyond big tech companies such as Google and Baidu.

IBM is teaming up with Salesforce to make it easier for Salesforce customers to use data from IBM's Watson artificial intelligence platform. As part of the partnership, IBM has signed a deal to deploy the Salesforce Service Cloud for internal use there. The value of the deal and proposed pricing of the joint products were not disclosed. The deal has several parts. Both companies, like many others in the tech industry, are making investments in artificial intelligence and machine learning, by which computer programs attempt to connect data in new ways to provide new kinds of insights and assistance to users, and both frequently cite the importance of AI in their sales pitches to customers.