The opportunities to transform customer experiences by using AI as a marketing team are endless. We've now started to move beyond the hype. AI is not the domain of FTSE 250's with teams of data scientists anymore. We have seen AI democratised – through platform offerings, intelligent API's, and all the smarts embedded in SaaS/PaaS offerings making it easier for all organisations, no matter their size to access. MarTech in particular has been prominent in landing AI into organisations, sometimes in isolated pockets, but these are fertile grounds to experiment on. When human ingenuity and technology combine, for me that is the sweet spot and where the magic happens.

In the following, I share the key learnings of the webinar. AI is not a secret sauce and requires lots of good data to create real value. Companies need to first separate the hype from the actual capabilities of AI, defining what AI means for them and how it might create value. Moving an entire company towards the adoption of AI is a challenging task and needs lots of educational effort. AI is not the solution to all problems. Building products do not start with thinking about AI but finding a meaningful problem that once solved adds value for the customer or user.

Artificial intelligence initiatives are springing up in almost every industry and generating a huge market in their wake. Gartner predicts that AI augmentation will generate $3.9 trillion in business value by 2022 alone. What's more, Gartner says that AI promises to be the most disruptive class of technologies during the next 10 years, driven by increases in computational power, advances in storage technology, the availability of new data and the ubiquity of deep learning toolkits. Organizations making the journey to AI face a multitude of complex choices related to data, skillsets, software stacks, analytic toolkits and infrastructure components. Each of these choices has significant implications for the time to value associated with AI initiatives.