As fans of Blade Runner and The Terminator can testify, AI and particularly AI disaster scenarios are a subject most people can't get enough of. Therefore, when AI technology and investment began to grow, it quickly caught the public's imagination. The problem is that the technology hasn't kept pace. The resulting gap between the perception and the reality has led us to enter what the Gartner Hype Cycle calls'the trough of disillusionment' with AI. This is especially apparent in the marketing industry, where, for all the talk of AI at industry events and in the media, only 27% of marketers in the UK are actually using it in their jobs.

AI is already being implemented in businesses around the world, and while worries persist over whether robots will be taking over the workplace, some are predicting that it will actually improve and even create jobs in the future. John Williams, Head of Marketing at Instant Offices offers some AI trends you should be aware of for your business. From devices in our homes to mobile apps, AI has already made its way into our daily lives. The workplace is no exception and AI has already helped businesses make better use of data and streamline processes. Artificial Intelligence on Big Data – Businesses are starting to use data to make decisions with the help of algorithms and real-time methods.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will play a key role in revolutionising marketing in the near future, according to a new white paper looking into how technology drives marketing effectiveness. Relay42, the company that empowers marketers to create AI-driven customer journeys, has published a socially-sourced whitepaper that provides a unique view of the relationship between marketing and technology. The whitepaper, entitled'Cross-channel Personalization: The Heart of Customer-centricity', found that the potential of technology to make the marketing function more effective and sophisticated cannot be underestimated -- a sentiment echoed by the contributions of numerous industry experts. In particular, artificial intelligence (AI) will play a key role in revolutionising marketing in the near future. It also found that, despite the benefits on offer, marketers commonly face challenges in getting the most out of technology.

News agency Reuters has launched Lynx Insight, an AI-powered tool designed to help its journalists create stories, in a move that could also have implications for content marketing. The tool can analyse data, suggest story ideas, and even write some sentences. It has been trialled by dozens of journalists since the summer, and will now be rolled out across Reuters newsrooms. Reuters said the aim was not to replace reporters but instead augment them with a digital data scientist and copywriting assistant. Reg Chua, executive editor of editorial operations, data and innovation at Reuters, said: "The real value is using machines to do what they're good at and then presenting that to humans -- that's the best of both worlds."

AI has been identified as a threat to the warehouse and logistics industry, but what about retail workers? A new report from Blue Yonder looks at how AI could support rather than replace human retail workers. A report from the Martin School at the University of Oxford and Citi estimated that, while perhaps unsurprisingly 80 per cent of retail transportation, warehousing and logistics jobs are at risk due to automation and artificial intelligence, 63 per cent of sales positions are also under threat. Uwe Weiss, CEO at Blue Yonder, argues that removing sales staff from the shop floor to be replaced by AI would be the wrong approach for retailers, as they should be enabling their employees to do what they do best, providing friendly, responsive and bespoke customer service, and letting the machines take care of the manual time-consuming processes, such as replenishment, that require analysis of vast quantities of data and keep staff away from delivering good customer service. For decades, large-scale retail companies have used manual processes to anticipate consumer demand, and stock replenishment has often been based on gut feeling, assumptions, existing agreements with wholesalers and expectations that are hard to measure.

How can chatbots improve the user experience in ecommerce? This infographic looks at how AI can help customer service agents focus on more complicated tasks. Chatbots are artificially intelligent tools capable of engaging multiple users for communicating basic information. Their importance in conversational commerce is growing by the day as social media giants like Facebook have already deployed around 12,000 bots on messenger. Chatbots have demonstrated a lot of potential in E-Commerce due to their instantaneity and ease of use.

It's no secret that AI is going to advance and grow beyond anything we could have imagined just decades ago, but is the future of AI going to be positive or negative? RS Components has collated the opinions and thoughts, in the form of well known quotes, of some of the biggest names in the science and technology industries to determine whether we should be excited about what the future of AI holds, or if its impact could be more negative than positive. Since 2012, the overall opinion of the future of AI has become more positive and more and more big names in science and tech appear to be embracing it rather than fearing it. The founder of Facebook has a much more positive outlook on the future of AI than physicist Stephen Hawking, with Zuckerberg believing that AI will improve humans' health and safety whilst Hawking believes that AI could, in fact, lead to the end of the human race as we know it. This suggests that the more we understand about AI, the more elements we'll recognise that have the potential to improve and enhance aspects of our lives.

While artificial intelligence is becomes a major new tool for marketers, nearly one in two retailers are missing out on leveraging AI marketing to better understand customer behaviours, according to new research. The study, conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Emarsys, looked at the growing role of AI in the retail and e-commerce industries. In an industry that's thought to be going through a'creativity crisis', there's some good news for retail marketers amongst the findings: The study, entitled'Building Trust and Confidence: AI Marketing Readiness in Retail and e-Commerce1', sought to understand if there is still a gap between the readiness of AI marketing solutions to execute on real-time B2C marketing campaigns, and the readiness of marketing tech users and business decision makers to adopt AI marketing technology. Businesses polled across US, UK, Germany, France and Australia had revenues from at least $50m to more than $5bn. The study highlighted that marketers and business decision makers polled believe AI-powered marketing will shift the role of marketing toward more strategic work (79%) and make marketing teams more efficient (86%) and effective (86%), as well as enabling them to focus on value-generating tasks as AI automates workflows (82%) and reinventing the way that marketers work (82%).

Salesforce is ramping up its artificial intelligence tools with additions to its'Einstein' marketing platform for brands. The marketing suite, initially launched last autumn within the Salesforce platform, will now include three new AI tools for developers. These algorithms enable third-party developers to add Einstein intelligence to applications built on top of the Salesforce platform. The new services include sentiment and intent analysis and image recognition analysis tools that can count objects and even recognise attributes like colour or size. The Einstein Intent tool allows programmers to understand the intent of customer inquiries, which could make it easier to automatically route leads, escalate service cases or personalize a marketing campaign through a custom app. This could be particularly useful for prioritizing customer service inquiries.