Digital marketers still have a job of course. But it is not going to be quite the same job, as artificial intelligence begins its "second act". Yes, AI is still good at compiling, sorting and categorizing massive amounts of data. Only now it's increasingly able to assist in creating content in ways it could not before. All you need to do is give an AI app a specific input.

A new technique that measures the reasoning power of artificial intelligence (AI) shows that machines are catching up to humans in their abilities to think, experts say. Researchers at MIT and IBM Research have created a method that enables a user to rank the results of a machine-learning model's behavior. Their technique, called Shared Interest, incorporates metrics that compare how well a model's thinking matches people's. "Today, AI is capable of reaching (and, in some cases, exceeding) human performance in specific tasks, including image recognition and language understanding," Pieter Buteneers, director of engineering in machine learning and AI at the communications company Sinch, told Lifewire in an email interview. "With natural language processing (NLP), AI systems can interpret, write and speak languages as well as humans, and the AI can even adjust its dialect and tone to align with its human peers."

Can common business sense be programmed into AI? Many are certainly trying to do just that. But there are decisions that often require a level of empathy -- let alone common-sense -- that may be too difficult to embed into algorithms. In addition, while AI and machine learning are the hot tickets of the moment, technologists and decision-makers need to think about whether it offers a practical solution to every problem or opportunity. Machine learning, task automation and robotics are already widely used in business.