It's one thing to know whether an individual customer is intrigued by a new mattress or considering a replacement for their sofa's throw pillows; it's another to know to how to move these people to go ahead and make a purchase. When deployed strategically, artificial intelligence (AI) can be a marketer's trusted customer experience ally--transforming customer data into actionable insights and creating new opportunities for personalization at scale. On the other hand, when AI is viewed as merely a quick fix, its haphazard deployment at best can amount to a missed opportunity and at worse undermine trust with an organization's customers. This phenomenon is not unique to AI. In today's fast-moving digital economy, it's not uncommon for performance and results to lag behind expectations.

The concept of artificial intelligence was the stuff of science fiction in the early days and became popular when anthropomorphic robots were featured on literature and eventually the silver screen. With technology making amazing things happen over the years, science fiction has now become reality. AI has improved in leaps and bounds in recent years, with machines now closer to being that of the droids of Star Wars. Our real-world robots are now being developed to be capable of carrying out tasks in such a way that we consider'smart' due to machine learning (ML). Machine learning is an advanced application of AI based on the idea that humans feed machines data and let them learn for themselves.

The world has more data than ever before. In fact, it's estimated that by 2020, we'll produce 44 zettabytes every day. One gigabyte can hold the contents of enough books to cover a 30-foot-long shelf. That's a lot of data -- too much for most companies to process. And yet front-line employees are still often left operating with data that's "too little, too late."