As a marketer, it can sometimes seem like the work my engineering colleagues are doing is magic -- pure computer science sorcery. I mean, they're building a chatbot that can communicate using human language and learn from the conversations it's having. AI can be a tough topic to wrap your head around. And with all of the various branches -- Machine Learning, deep learning, natural language processing -- it's not a topic that you can hope to master by reading a single blog post. So the purpose of this post isn't to provide you with an exhaustive, engineering-degree-level understanding of AI.

Marketing and sales seemed to be much easier in the past. Customers simply visited a retail shop, where they could ask a knowledgeable salesperson about a product they discovered in a local newspaper. In recent years, the ubiquity of the internet and a state-of-the-art technology changed everything. Customers became prosumers, well informed about the product before the purchase. And what is even more important, customers frequently use a variety of channels: online and traditional stores, mobile apps, online auctions, price comparison websites, social media and more. Today, in spite of all the available technologies, life is more challenging for both marketers and salespeople.