Good AI strategies are built around multi-disciplinary internal teams, according to Bannister. To have a successful AI strategy, it's critical for companies to connect their technology, data and business teams. It's beneficial to have technologists working on business teams and people with a business background working within technology groups, he said. "A clear strategy will add trust in the organization to overcome psychological barriers and add funding in the right places to overcome technological and infrastructure barriers," said Omri Mendellevich, co-founder and CTO of Dynamic Yield. Another issue is that some companies apply AI to problems where AI isn't the appropriate solution, according to Arnab Bhadury, data scientist at Flipboard.

According to a January 2018 survey of 200 US senior decision marketers conducted by Verndale, personalization is most important for increasing sales and improving customer satisfaction and retention. Yet, 84% of survey respondents agreed that the potential of personalization has not been fully realized. "In an increasingly connected, digital world, consumers now expect brands to serve them personalized content at the optimal moment and on their preferred device," said Jeremy Hlavacek, head of revenue at IBM Watson Advertising. "To achieve this level of engagement, marketers need the ability to predict--without coming across as intrusive--what their target audience will think, feel, say and do across a variety of scenarios. And with the incredible amount of data available now, personalization is more complex than ever," he said.

Marketers' uptake of artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to grow as more companies invest in the emerging technology. Two of the most popular ways that marketers are applying AI are for ad targeting and audience segmentation. In a May 2018 survey of 400 digital advertising professionals worldwide conducted by Econsultancy and MediaMath, just one-fifth of respondents said that they don't plan to use AI for audience targeting or audience segmentation. Nearly half of those polled already do. Grouping together and reaching users has become a pragmatic way for marketers to apply AI.

Using AI to group together and reach users is simply a pragmatic way to utilize the technology. In a January 2018 survey of 450 advertisers, publishers and tech developers in North America by Winterberry Group and the Data & Marketing Association (DMA), 62.0% of respondents said that improving audience segmentation to support better ad targeting was one of their top campaign management priorities. Given that improving audience segmentation is considered by many advertisers to be their top campaign management goal, it makes sense that large cloud companies like Nielsen, IBM and Salesforce have invested millions in AI products that automate the creation of custom audience segments for marketers. About four in 10 of the worldwide advertisers surveyed by MediaMath and Econsultancy said they use AI for media spend optimization. This is another application of AI that is increasing among marketers as their demand-side platforms add AI features to increase the probability that a given programmatic bid will win its auction.