Daniel Faggella is Head of Research at Emerj. Called upon by the United Nations, World Bank, INTERPOL, and leading enterprises, Daniel is a globally sought-after expert on the competitive strategy implications of AI for business and government leaders. NVIDIA is a multinational company known for its computing hardware, especially its graphics processing units (GPUs) and systems on chip units (SoCs) for mobile devices. The company went public on January 22, 1999. While the company remains focused on hardware production, it has implemented deep learning and AI into its GPUs and specific software, such as its autonomous driving platform. The company trades on the NASDAQ (symbol: NVDA) with a market cap of just above $418 billion and employs approximately 23,000 globally.

Until now, though, the company never publicly tried to qualify the overall impact of these technologies on overall sales. Tom Pinckney, VP of applied research at eBay, said in an interview with VentureBeat, "It is indeed north of $1 billion per quarter." AI and ML are driving incremental sales that wouldn't otherwise have happened, he said, citing in particular AI used for search ranking, inventory understanding, buyer intent, and personalization. He said these incremental results are being achieved "quarter after quarter, and year after year." To be clear, sales for eBay are not the same thing as revenue.

Marketers with blind faith in adtech and martech are at risk of putting advertising in front of people who were going to buy anyway and waste time and money on useless personalisation activities. This was the message from IAG's director of media and technology, Dr Willem Paling, and one-to-one marketing director, Jason Ridge, who took to the stage at CeBIT 2018 to discuss where and when to use AI-enabled martech, and why it's vital to set the right goals around it. Ridge said all consumers expect personalised experiences, and marketers can throw data into AI platforms to ensure the content coming out of their tech engines is personalised. But IAG is starting to ask if it really needs the technology to achieve relevance. "No one will say delivering customers' personalisation isn't a good thing. However, Amazon has hundreds of millions of products, and Facebook has millions of advertisers, and given the opportunity to put a product or content in front of customers, they are left with a dilemma of which product or content to put in front of which customer. So of course it makes sense to use AI or ML to do this," Ridge said.