IBM THINK is the premier gathering of technologists, marketers, and subject matter experts for all things IT, security, compliance, and AI/machine learning. I'm honored to be speaking again at THINK, this year in San Francisco, February 11-15. What will I be presenting? I'll be showing some brand new applications of machine learning for marketing, five applications that provide tangible benefits to marketers who want to get more results out of their data. What are these applications of machine learning for marketers?

Chatterjee First let's talk about Cognitive Systems. These are systems that use data and analytics to understand, learn and make informed choices or recommendations. It combines computing technology, data and decision science to optimize choices in an automated and iterative way. To simplify, we refer to Cognitive Systems as URL: Understand, Reason, Learn. Cognitive Marketing systems can continually build knowledge about customers and communicate to marketers--through natural language--to seamlessly fit into the structures people traditionally use to analyze and report outcomes, find insights and draw conclusions.

As a young brand manager at Miller Brewing Company in 1995, I crunched data using Excel spreadsheets, a process not so far away from what's going on at a lot of companies today, I'd wager. What does AI have to do with marketing--a human-to-human endeavor if there ever was one? Consider this noteworthy bullet point in Gartner's "Top Predictions for IT Organizations and Users for 2016 and Beyond." When most people envision AI, they think of game show-playing computers, self-driving cars, or robot armies. Robotics is at one end of the AI spectrum; at the other is what's referred to as "machine learning," the ability to program a computer to recognize patterns and build models that let it make decisions or generate predictions.

Beyond being a powerful ad, this is also a great example of cognitive marketing. The brand that made the ad, Always, did a different play on their traditional positioning: a product that helped women feel more self-confident on their most trying days of the month. Instead, they got to the root of why women feel less confident as adults. Moreover, women never regain the pre-puberty level of self-esteem." This put the team at Leo Burnett to work, building a campaign that would try to reduce that drop in self-esteem even by the smallest amount to make a difference to women everywhere and more importantly: to shake up anyone who had ever used the phrase "like a girl" as an insult. Cognitive Marketing is a way to use the brain's ability to think about itself as a way to form a connection with a customer and create brand loyalty and conversions. As Manas Chowdhury puts it elegantly in his article on'How Cognitive Marketing Is Changing The Digital World?' "Our constantly developing society depends on advertising human needs.

The age of artificial intelligence (AI) is upon us. In the past few years, vast improvements have been made in how well computers can recognise objects in images and understand human voices. Progress in these areas has been made due to increased computing power and the availability of large stores of data, which, when combined, have made AI systems dramatically more effective. These same forces are also being used in marketing. AI, or'cognitive', marketing systems use industrial computing power, big data, and machine learning to improve marketing performance.

Digital marketers, accustomed to using software that helps them think about marketing, are now transitioning to a time when software will do much of the thinking. It's called cognitive marketing, and research firm IDC expects that half of all companies will use this emerging generation of computer intelligence for their marketing and sales efforts by 2020. IDC Research Manager Gerry Murray (who is speaking at our MarTech conference next week) predicts that just a year from now, the current group of several dozen applications employing cognitive computing will become "hundreds." Such applications, he told me, utilize "processes akin to the human brain, [by] taking signals and drawing conclusions." The converging drivers -- massive computing power, massive amounts of data and a booming population of connected devices and sensors -- are of course instrumental in delivering this new kind of marketing.