Artificial Intelligence is an industry which is growing permanently, and there has been significant investment in the space in the last years. The market value of AI is expected to reach $38bn in 2025. Here's a list of the top five sales and marketing companies that use Artificial Intelligence to power up businesses. Invoca provides software for sales and marketers looking for call tracking and analytics. With Invoca, you can drive, track and automate inbound calls.

Amplero's software, relying on algorithms designed to detect patterns in data, aims to thread through companies' existing sales and marketing tools, running small experiments to find optimal ways for businesses to communicate with their customers. Seattle startup Amplero has bagged $17.5 million in investment, which the company plans to put to work building out its machine-learning-powered software for business marketers. Amplero's software, relying on algorithms designed to detect patterns in data, aims to thread through companies' existing sales and marketing tools, running small experiments to find optimal ways for businesses to communicate with their customers. The startup was spun out of Seattle invoicing-software company Globys last year. Olly Downs, formerly Globys' chief technology officer, leads the firm, which has about 45 employees.

AI and machine learning (ML) are set to pervade the marketing technology universe throughout 2017. With billions of marketing touchpoints to learn from, marketing technology is a natural home for ML capabilities. And today, Amplero has announced its Influencer Optimization capability, powered by machine learning and offered as part of its Intelligence Platform. The new addition makes it possible to discover not only your most influential customers, but also understand the actions they are taking and how to optimize your connections with these valuable advocates. So how does it work, and why is machine learning particularly suited to this optimization and identification process?

For consumer companies, large-scale leveraging of customer and behavioral data to drive personalized customer experiences is turning into a virtual arms race. Marketing technology platforms of the last 10 years were built around campaign process that were still highly manual, requiring marketing execs to do all the testing, optimization and which makes the cycle time for learning and actually influencing marketing very slow. Now more and more marketers recognize the need to deploy advanced personalization capabilities that make the use of machine-learned optimization. And, Matt Fleckenstein, Chief Product Officer at Amplero, helps marketers achieve just that. With a track record for conceiving, building, and launching martech products and services it comes easy to him.

Kristina: Why should subscription-based software companies care about machine learning? Matt Fleckenstein, SVP Products and Marketing, Amplero: Today's connected customers demand that companies provide a service to them that is personalized, connected, memorable, and one that provides ongoing value (the more I use it, the more value I receive). Traditional marketing tools simply can't scale to deliver against these connected customer demands, as rules-based marketing automation solutions require a human to set up complex rules trying to account for thousands of different contexts across the customer journey. Humans simply can't manage and implement, let alone continually optimize, for thousands of customer contexts across the journey, so marketers are increasingly looking to computers and machine learning for help. Kristina: How do machine learning marketing capabilities play into the priorities of SaaS subscription companies?