This requires a delicate balance between engaging smart, predictive technologies, such as ML and AI, and honoring the ethical standards that build trust between brands and customers. The trend toward collecting and cultivating zero- and first-party data through an open and transparent value exchange with consumers has become table stakes for creating personalized customer experiences that result in long-term loyal relationships. But using only historical data to build black-box algorithms that continuously learn upon themselves can perpetuate intrinsic biases with regard to such characteristics as gender, race, ethnicity and economic status. Ethical AI offers a unique opportunity to establish trust with consumers, who I've found are increasingly seeking humanized communication from the brands with which they engage. The question of ethics in marketing and AI has been a hot topic for some time, and many brands have worked hard to ensure their targeting algorithms aren't biased.

Like every other industry, marketing has been on a decades-long journey of change driven by constant advancements in data management, analytics and technology, along with external influences such as privacy legislation, market fluctuations, consumer trends and social sentiment (not to mention a global pandemic). But I think the next era of transformation in marketing will be like no other, with technologies like machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) playing a more prominent role than ever before. With new technologies come elevated restraints and the need for moral metrics. Today's shifts revolve around the clear truth that consumers have raised the bar by controlling their relationship with brands and determining their own levels of engagement. And every business survives and thrives based on its command of the customer experience.

Paul Roetzer, founder and CEO of the Marketing AI Institute, said that marketing AI is the "science of making marketing smart." Notice he didn't say "automate things." Marketing AI is not marketing automation, and therein lies an important point – a lot of marketers still don't understand what AI brings to the table for marketing. Roetzer's Institute, in partnership with Drift, a provider of conversational AI solutions, recently published 2021 The State of Marketing AI. It's a survey that looked at how marketing AI is in use today, the most common use cases, and where companies see themselves using AI in the next five years. Yes, we've been having lots of conversations around AI (Artificial Intelligence) for years.

LONDON – Unprecedented volumes of data and advances in AI are transforming the marketing services industry, according to a report released by leading technology advisory and investment firm GP Bullhound. AI and the Services Revolution reveals that investments in marketing-related AI have grown steadily, with $2.5bn of investments in emerging companies in 2018 – and $1 billion invested in Q2 2019 alone. A total of $11bn has been invested in the sector since 2014. While North America accounts for the majority of funding into AI marketing companies with a yearly volume of around $1.5bn in 2014-2018, Europe is showing the highest growth rate. The European market grew to represent 30% of all transactions in H1 2019, while Asian transactions have declined from 20% in 2018 to only 5% as of H1 2019.

Unprecedented volumes of data and advances in AI are transforming the marketing services industry, according to new research from technology advisory and investment firm GP Bullhound. The firm's new report, AI and the Services Revolution, reveals that investments in marketing-related AI have grown steadily, with $2.5 billion of investments in emerging companies in 2018--and $1 billion invested in Q2 2019 alone. In all, a total of $11 billion has been invested in the sector since 2014. While North America accounts for the majority of funding into AI marketing companies, with a yearly volume of around $1.5 billion in 2014-2018, Europe is showing the highest growth rate. The European market grew to represent 30 percent of all transactions in H1 2019, while Asian transactions have declined from 20 percent in 2018 to only 5 percent as of H1 2019.

Can you define Marketing AI? Or, do you think Marketing AI is just another overhyped, technology buzzword? The AI Reality: You already use artificial intelligence everyday without realizing it! Without calling attention to the technology behind the services they deliver, Facebook, Google, Netflix, and Amazon have integrated elements of AI into their offerings. More importantly, did you know: Many organizations already have started to automate repetitive functions using Marketing AI to achieve business goals? BUT: Don't ask HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey or C-3PO and R2-D2 from Star Wars to help you.

What is new about AI marketing is the accuracy you have when delivering and executing toward a specific target, the complete (or almost complete) automation of procedures and actions, and the high economic efficiency resulting from using AI in these marketing activities. This is yet another reason for marketing teams to leverage AI: If you don't, you risk falling out of sync with customers and losing the competitive edge as consumers turn to AI solutions as well.

In 2015 my marketing agency, PR 20/20, was struggling to create enough content at scale while maintaining quality, a challenge faced by many marketing organizations. At the same time, advancements in marketing AI (artificial intelligence) convinced me that machine-assisted content could be a possibility in the near future. The big question I couldn't get out of my mind was: Could my company automate and scale our content marketing activities using marketing AI to create greater value for our clients and efficiency for our business? I heard the managing editor of the Associated Press and the CEO of Automated Insights talk about how the AP had automated the creation of its earnings reports using AI, and I knew we had to explore the technology further. As we did, we learned not only how to better automate and scale content creation, but that marketing AI was about to transform content marketing forever.

Gone are the times when nearly everything was done manually, and now we are living in a time in which a lot of work is taken over by software, machines, and various automatic procedures. In this aspect, artificial intelligence (AI) has a prominent place in all the progress made today. AI is the science of machines and computers developing intelligence like humans. In this technology, the machines have the ability to do some of the easy to complicated things that humans need to do on a regular basis. There are distinct kinds of artificial intelligence, each needing some amount of technical knowledge to completely understand.

From The Terminator's "Skynet" to 2001: A Space Odyssey's "Hal", Hollywood science fiction films featuring artificial intelligence (AI) often assume that the moment of consciousness is what suddenly makes the machine super-intelligent and able to match (or surpass) human abilities. As marketers, it's easy to accept this fantasy and imagine some distant future where AI exceeds marketers capabilities. The truth is less romantic, more utilitarian and already driving business value today. While the dramatic emergence of consciousness in the form of "the singularity" makes for great films, Yuval Noah Harari, an internationally renowned historian, argues that consciousness isn't required to make a dramatic impact on corporate goals such as revenue growth, customer engagement or profitability. Harari explains, "As long as they went hand in hand [consciousness & intelligence], debating their relative value was just an amusing pastime for philosophers."