Artificial intelligence has already changed the way businesses communicate with customers and how marketing plans are implemented. It's impossible to forecast what the future holds in such a fast-changing world, but there are some things as to what we might expect in the near future… The significance of artificial intelligence and its following components has long been recognized. AI is viewed as a tool and method for making the world around us a better place. These machines can speed up your operations and processes while maintaining precision and accuracy, which makes AI a helpful and crucial instrument. AI technologies and apps are not only relevant to our general and daily lives but also make the world a place that is free from errors through their easy and everyday ways.

How often do you reflect on the ways technology changes your life as a marketer? I mean the sly, step-by-way manner in which new tech slides neatly into your existing stack and subtly reframes the game on you. These changes don't always alter your job in dramatic ways, but they eliminate the hassles and headaches. They may speed up your time to results, automate painful routines, and enable you to focus on what matters most. Very rarely, these technologies also let you do things you'd never considered possible. No incoming martech makes a better case for this sort of incremental innovation than artificial intelligence. While new AI products are surely on the horizon--self-driving cars are coming any day now, possibly, maybe--AI's most dramatic effect on your job today lies in adding new features across the tools that you're already using.

Many find themselves impressed by machines that respond like humans or computers that perform feats of strategy and cognition mimicking human ingenuity. But for others, it also planted a seed of unease. This fear stems from the expected fear of job loss. As automation technology has been known to result in higher productivity, modern industries became increasingly dependent upon it and less reliant on human workers. This is widely evident in the marketing landscape wherein the digital and social media platforms continue to expand, and brands need to work twice as hard to get their message across their target audience.

There is no shortage of marketing buzzwords with short-term industry hype. When I first heard about the intersection of AI and marketing, while working with a machine-learning startup out of the Bay Area, I assumed the use of bots in marketing would follow suit as a buzzworthy concept that would quickly run its course. Fast-forward five years, and it's evident that AI and its related technologies will run parallel to nearly all marketing tactics in the future. Here are three unexpected ways that the adoption of AI is currently shifting and will continue to accelerate the evolution of the marketing landscape over the next three to five years. Perhaps the greatest potential benefit of AI within the context of marketing, sales, customer support and business in general is the capacity for it to reduce what is known to psychologists as "Cognitive load."

Back in the day, the idea of interacting with robots and computers seemed out of an episode of The Jetsons. But fast-forward to today, and some of the most far-fetched ideas back then have become our reality, and you know what? In Back to The Future II, they used tablets to get Marty to sign up to save the Clock Tower, and then this massive shark pops out of a sign, which freaked 1984 Marty out. The only thing is – do you remember how pixelated the shark was? Magic Leap is augmenting reality to look like a whale can literally crash into a gymnasium, without so much as a drop of water.

Sometimes we over-complicate AI, thinking it's too high-tech and futuristic for us to use in our everyday work. But AI is not the future, it's the present. Let's not consider it an unattainable technology, because sometimes AI is so simple that we don't even realise we're using it. AI in marketing is here right now. Results from our latest State of Marketing research report show the highest-performing marketers are 9.7 times more likely than underperformers to be completely satisfied with their ability to personalise omni-channel experiences at scale.

There is no shortage of marketing buzzwords with short-term industry hype. When I first heard about the intersection of AI and marketing, while working with a machine-learning startup out of the Bay Area, I assumed the use of bots in marketing would follow suit as a buzzworthy concept that would quickly run its course. Fast-forward five years, and it's evident that AI and its related technologies will run parallel to nearly all marketing tactics in the future. Here are three unexpected ways that the adoption of AI is currently shifting and will continue to accelerate the evolution of the marketing landscape over the next three to five years. Perhaps the greatest potential benefit of AI within the context of marketing, sales, customer support and business in general is the capacity for it to reduce what is known to psychologists as "cognitive load."

Picture if you will, dear reader, the marketing apocalypse, a place where human-powered engines are less and less relevant and we are facing a new dawn: robot writing, triggered email campaigns, automated social scheduling and responses, ways to track users wherever they go. We would say welcome to the future, but that scares an awful lot of people. Case in point: all these stories about the robots coming to take our marketing jobs. There is legitimate worry in our industry today, and with good reason. AI and marketing are a perfect mix; so much of what we do involves crunching data and analytics.

Groceries, toys and flowers are no longer the only things filling UK-based Ocado's massive Hampshire warehouse. In the two years since the company started branding itself as the world's largest online-only supermarket, the distribution center has begun teeming with robots steered by algorithms that control the logistics side of the company's 24/7 grind. Now, frozen meat and canned tomatoes are sorted and picked up by robots, which allows the customer service team to deliver them to the doorstep more quickly. The explosion of AI in e-commerce has allowed online retail giants to explore advanced technologies. As firms in the e-commerce industry continue to expand and cater to a growing number of customers, the need for an automated system to streamline their operations has become one of their top investment priorities.

The era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is upon us. More and more, computer systems will become able to perform tasks that previously required human intelligence, such as decision making, visual perception, and speech and language recognition. Marketing, like most other fields, will feel AI's impact in several areas, including database marketing techniques, search queries and search engine optimization (SEO), personalization, predictive customer service, sales forecasting, customer segmentation, pricing, and many others. Act-On recently asked several marketing experts and analysts for their assessments of the pros and cons of using Artificial Intelligence in marketing and what they foresee for the future. Question: Will Artificial Intelligence (AI) be marketing's friend or foe? How do you see the two co-existing as AI becomes more mainstream?