Most people know about one of the greatest salespeople of all time, Steve Jobs. When Jobs introduced the first iPhone, in January of 2007, he had to convince a skeptical world to pay a then-outrageous sum of $600 for a phone made by a company that had never produced a handset before, with a slick back and no physical keyboard to peck out emails. It was a creative act on Jobs's part, an ability to craft a vision of how the world would be and to convince people their lives would be better in that world if they bought his shiny new object. That creative act poses a challenge for a raft of software startups trying to use artificial intelligence to reinvent sales. Companies including Vymo, InsideSales, SalesLoft, and Outreach have gotten hundreds of millions in financing in the last few years, in hopes that by mining historical data such as emails and customer call logs, they can figure out what the best salespeople do.

Most people know about one of the greatest salespeople of all time, Steve Jobs. When Jobs introduced the first iPhone, in January of 2007, he had to convince a skeptical world to pay a then-outrageous sum of $600 for a phone made by a company that had never produced a handset before, with a slick back and no physical keyboard to peck out emails. It was a creative act on Jobs's part, an ability to craft a vision of how the world would be and to convince people their lives would be better in that world if they bought his shiny new object. That creative act poses a challenge for a raft of software startups trying to use artificial intelligence to reinvent sales. Companies including Vymo, InsideSales, SalesLoft, and Outreach have gotten hundreds of millions in financing in the last few years, in hopes that by mining historical data such as emails and customer call logs, they can figure out what the best salespeople do.

"AI is becoming more than just mainstream," says a new study from sales acceleration platform InsideSales.com. Out today, "State of Artificial Intelligence for Sales & Marketing/2018 Report" (free, registration required) shows "most people in the industry understand that AI truly enhances a sales rep's role and makes it more efficient," VP of Marketing and report co-author Gabe Larsen told me via email. "But AI isn't a stand-in for humans," he noted. "People need to sell to people, and people want to buy from people they like." Only nine percent of respondents in the company's new survey believe that AI will replace sales reps in the next five years.

"AI is becoming more than just mainstream," says a new study from sales acceleration platform InsideSales.com. Out today, "State of Artificial Intelligence for Sales & Marketing/2018 Report" (free, registration required) shows "most people in the industry understand that AI truly enhances a sales rep's role and makes it more efficient," VP of Marketing and report co-author Gabe Larsen told me via email. "But AI isn't a stand-in for humans," he noted. "People need to sell to people, and people want to buy from people they like." Only nine percent of respondents in the company's new survey believe that AI will replace sales reps in the next five years.

Artificial Intelligence is an industry which is growing permanently, and there has been significant investment in the space in the last years. The market value of AI is expected to reach $38bn in 2025. Here's a list of the top five sales and marketing companies that use Artificial Intelligence to power up businesses. Invoca provides software for sales and marketers looking for call tracking and analytics. With Invoca, you can drive, track and automate inbound calls.

I did a startup in the area of Artificial Intelligence-driven Sales Prospecting in 1997. Much water has flown under the proverbial bridge. This discussion takes us to the state of the art, twenty years later. I run, what we call, InsideSales' lab. That is our research and best practice group here at InsideSales.com.

Silicon Slopes, UT: InsideSales.com, the artificial intelligence (AI) growth platform for sales, showcased today the next generation of AI technology to help sales leaders get actionable insights on their performance as compared to industry and cross-industry data. This groundbreaking technology will offer leaders a real-time view of performance and actionable AI recommendations to build pipeline and close deals. "We're continuously raising the bar on what the future of sales performance looks like," said Dave Elkington, CEO of InsideSales.com. "We want teams using artificial intelligence to be able to see, in real time, how they are doing compared to other companies in their industry--and how AI is making a difference to their sales efforts." "This technology will tap into the trillions of anonymized data points we've collected from thousands of companies to create benchmarks for key performance indicators in each industry," Elkington continued.

It's safe to say that the next generation of successful businesses will look to Augmented Intelligence (AI) to revolutionize their entire organization. Look no further than IBM and Salesforce's landmark global strategic partnership, which will seamlessly connect IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein to enable new levels of intelligent customer engagement for companies of all sizes. Rather than be isolated to databases, pulled by queries in response to an ask, data is being integrated throughout an organization's business processes–across Service, Sales, Marketing, and IT–turned into actionable and predictive analytics by intelligent customer and employee-facing apps. However, the conversation in today's global market pivots around not how much data an organization captures, but how it leverages that data to get closer to its customers while maintaining scalability across the enterprise. Data intelligence is powering a new kind of business-customer relationship, based on delivering personal, simple, and consistent experiences.

Depending on your world view, that may or may not seem like a lot of money (or Whoppers). But here's a stat that's big in any context: based on CB Insights' data, 2016's $5 billion resulted from a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 53.5%, starting from $589 million invested in 2012. Keep multiplying $5 billion by 1.5 for a few more years and pretty soon you get to serious money -- on top of the already invested $12.5 billion cumulative total for 2012-2016. Earlier this year, CB Insights ranked the top 100 most promising AI startups, and Fortune magazine produced this cool info graphic divvying up the top 50 by industry and global region (speaking of region, 62% of VCs' invested AI dollar value went to U.S. startups in 2016, compared with 79% in 2012). Which brings us to the top four advertising/marketing AI tech startups, as agreed on by CB Insights and Fortune.

Uber's cars are crashing, Microsoft's bots abusing people on twitter and US judges sentencing people using biased algorithms. That is, machine learning models rely on probabilistic assumptions because they're trying to model things that are uncertain. Probabilistic assumptions don't always hold, so the models don't always work. We should keep this in mind when building machine learning products so that we meet the expectations of our customers, at best, and avoid the unchecked use of machine learning in high-stakes situations, at worst. We may elaborate on the latter topic in a future article.