The best digital marketing tips from just a few years ago may no longer prove relevant. Yes, social media still dominates, but today's most effective campaigns look little like the leaders of 2013 or even 2016. Live streaming, wearables, and machine learning allow forward-thinking business leaders to gain an edge over those still attempting to grasp basic digital marketing concepts. Ready to update your company's marketing strategy? Touted by Entrepreneur as "the future of marketing," machine learning will begin to play a greater role among businesses of all sizes and across a broad range of industries in 2018.

CEO Jordi Torras sat down with Internet Retailer recently to talk about the unprecedented changes to the online customer experience as a result of emerging AI technology. He explains that "an ideal online shopping experience is like the one you would get in the real world, where the customer goes into a store and engages in a meaningful conversation about what they want with a knowledgeable sales rep." Replicating this experience digitally has proven to be one of the biggest hurdles within the e-commerce world; if the customer can't find it, they can't buy it. Realizing that online shoppers need a better way to interact with retail brands, Inbenta created an AI-powered natural language solution to better connect customers with the answers they are looking for, both within FAQs and product catalogs. According to Jordi, "artificial intelligence software is able to combine knowledge of products and how they're used to help customers find merchandise very quickly and efficiently, as well as receive intelligent answers to any questions they may have."

Merriam-Webster's two part definition of Artificial Intelligence or AI is "an area of computer science that deals with giving machines the ability to seem like they have human intelligence; the power of a machine to copy intelligent human behavior." Make no mistake about it, AI is very much the "in term" around the marketing water coolers. And as such there is no shortage of pieces being written espousing the benefits of AI on the world of marketing. Earlier this month Google unveiled Google Assistant, that was described as being most exciting new product announcement since the iPhone in 2007. According to Geek Time "It is an AI personal assistant that chats with you and can assist you with many tasks. You can chat or talk to the Assistant and it can bring you relevant information, send messages, book events, save reminders, change the lights, play content on your TV and many other actions. Google is working hard to bring more functionality to its Assistant, so you can expect its capabilities to improve over time."

Lounge apparel retailer FlyPolar uses a new service from vendor Sentient Technologies to test many elements quickly across multiple pages and is on track to double sales this month. Artificial intelligence can lead to real sales increases--and fast ones, too. Just ask loungewear retailer ShopFlyPolar.com. The web only merchant had hit a sales downturn, generating about 277,000 in web sales in February 2015 to about 50,000 in July 2016 says, says Shawn Broadus founder and CEO of FlyPolar. "We hit a slump," Broadus say.

GWYN is based on the Fluid Expert Personal Shopper (XPS) software platform, powered by IBM Watson. She is a gift concierge that intuitively guides customers through their shopping experience to help them select the perfect gift from 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc., including 1-800-Flowers.com,