Originally published on the Salesforce "360 blog" Customers care about end-to-end experiences, not how your company is organized. Business leaders are quick to say that a connected customer experience is a major business priority. But the truth is that they are struggling to do it well. New data captures the gap between business and digital transformation and the integrated experiences customers desire. Countless growing departments, new services abound, and the truth remains: Customers have to see you as one company.

Over the years, I've studied retail innovation and also retail stagnation. Among the white hot trends propelling retail startups and giving legacy brands hope are artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision, Internet of Things (IoT), connected sensors and good old fashioned ingenuity. My friend Macy Bayern of TechRepublic recently wrote about the role AI is specifically playing in retail innovation. Her resulting article features insights from industry experts and innovators. Brick and mortar stores are closing left and right, but artificial intelligence may be able to keep them alive.

Digital Marketplaces are flourishing today thanks to the advances made in Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, real-time personalization and the scale and speed of the latest generation of cloud platforms including the Google Cloud Platform. Today's digital marketplaces are capitalizing on these technologies to create trusted, virtual trading platforms and environments buyers and sellers rely on for a wide variety of tasks every day. Differentiated from B2B exchanges and communities from the 90s that often had high transaction costs, proprietary messaging protocols, and limited functionality, today's marketplaces are proving that secure, trusted scalability is achievable on standard cloud platforms. Kahuna recently partnered with Brian Solis of The Altimeter Group to produce a fascinating research study, The State (and Future) of Digital Marketplaces. The report is downloadable here (PDF, 14 pp., opt-in).

No matter how much sweetness or spin you add to it, early incarnations of AI-powered chatbots are the call centers of this generation. They're relatively inexpensive compared to human agents. Yes, chatbots scale engagement through new, popular messaging channels and introduce conversational commerce capabilities that carry the potential to deliver incredible experiences. But here's the thing…most of the interactions are basic, seeking to replicate existing transactions and experiences that only seem to wow those designing not experiencing them. On the other side of code and algorithms however, are discerning, sophisticated, self-interested human beings.

Sophia, the AI-powered robot who was infamously granted citizenship by Saudi Arabia recently beat me out for two keynote speaking opportunities. This is how I opened my presentation at the KQED studios in its inaugural Silicon Valley Conversations program, "The New Experts: How Robotics, AI and Automation Are Shaping the Future of Your Work." The event focused on the way new technologies are changing how we work, where we work and the skills we need to work. I joined Michael Chui, partner at McKinsey Global Institue, and Dr. Karen Myers, lab director of SRI International's Artificial Intelligence Center. We each had five minutes to open with a TED-style talk on our views of the future of AI and work.

I recently had the opportunity to talk to SAS about a topic close to their heart and mine: AI Marketing. Why are we excited about this? Well, you can read more of our conversation here but in a nutshell AI has the power to revolutionize the way we market and how we shape the customer journey. In the Q&A I delve into the competitive benefits of AI marketing, the power AI has to reshape traditional marketing, the changes it will bring to roles and expertise requirements and how to get started with AI marketing, right now, today. AI Marketing has the power to be a catalyst for change.

Heading into the New Year, many digital marketers and analysts predicted that we would see some of the biggest changes in digital marketing yet. So, how have things shaken out so far? I turned to Brian Solis of Altimeter Group, Joe Pulizzi of Content Marketing Institute, and Adam Berke of AdRoll to find out. As of now, the most common use of artificial intelligence in marketing has been in the form of machine learning. Programmatic buying arose as one of the most prevalent uses of machine learning a few years ago, and other uses of AI include predictive customer service, recommendations, and content curation.