I just returned from attending several spring digital marketing conferences – Adobe Summit and Martech West. In both the art of the possible was on full display and got me thinking about whether fully-automated AI-driven digital marketing could ever be a thing, and what realistic automation goals look like. Digital marketing continues to be on the leading edge of AI advances and high-tech innovations. Surveys repeatedly indicate AI professionals aim their efforts at infusing intelligence into digital marketing. And every day we're inundated with news of more advances in marketing automation such as: From all this, some might conclude the end of human-powered marketing is close at hand. But others, unconvinced by these tenuous signs, might simply respond, "Poppycock!"

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a broad term for technologies that imitate human intelligence. It covers a range of techniques such as voice and image recognition, machine learning techniques and semantic search. Machine Learning Techniques use algorithms to learn from past data, and create predictive models. Other AI applications do the work of human operators. Marketing has been under pressure since the time rapid technological development disrupted marketing as it was traditionally practiced.

Picture if you will, dear reader, the marketing apocalypse, a place where human-powered engines are less and less relevant and we are facing a new dawn: robot writing, triggered email campaigns, automated social scheduling and responses, ways to track users wherever they go. We would say welcome to the future, but that scares an awful lot of people. Case in point: all these stories about the robots coming to take our marketing jobs. There is legitimate worry in our industry today, and with good reason. AI and marketing are a perfect mix; so much of what we do involves crunching data and analytics.

While robots will not replace everything and everyone, there are many new skills and functions that today's marketers should explore. As more and more tasks become automated, it's crucial to pivot and acquire new skill sets.

Artificial intelligence-based marketing tools can now learn, predict, personalize, strategize, make decisions, take action, provide insights and create content. So, what can human marketers do to make sure they are still useful? To get some ideas about what skills humans might retain as the waves of AI-powered change roll in, we asked a veteran of marketing's ups and downs, Bonnie Crater. She's CEO and president of San Mateo, California-based marketing analytics firm Full Circle Insights, and she's held marketing exec positions at Realization Technologies, VoiceObjects, Salesforce, Genesys, Stratify and Netscape. While there is software to clean and optimize data, she said, it is likely there will be a long-term need for marketers with data management skills.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is well and truly on the rise across many sectors and industries. In fact, there's probably been a point where you've asked yourself: "could my job be taken over by a robot?". For recruiters, this could be an extremely likely possibility. Research into the HR and recruitment industries has found that 70% of HR managers believe the recruitment process would be more effective if it were more data-driven and, because of the technological advances in the industry, an increase in the use of AI would be an obvious solution to this problem. However, many could argue that an increase in AI will lead to jobs being put at risk – but should we simply embrace this change and prepare for new roles to open up within the sector? A human recruiter's manual ability to carry out candidate searches is much more limited than AI's.

A complete revolution in the marketing industry is around the corner. Dubbed by some as the "fourth industrial revolution," AI bots will dominate this new marketing landscape in every conceivable way. Equipped with advanced machine learning technology, they will come up with holistic, data driven digital campaigns. From effective copywriting to lead scoring and churn prediction, bots will do it all. So huge are the marketing potential, that tech giants are betting big on this new technology.

When robots named Pepper are taking orders at Pizza Hut, it's safe to say that we're entering the era of automation. Traditional jobs are being automated out of existence on a daily basis. Yet most marketers aren't concerned about becoming irrelevant in the near future. This is short-sighted; acknowledging that many marketing jobs aren't going to be around in another 10–20 years is the first step to staying competitive in an uncertain future. In 2015 alone, nearly 2.4 million U.S. jobs were outsourced to other countries.

Whether they're in marketing or some other discipline, it's odds-on that when artificial intelligence in the workplace is mentioned to somebody, one of the first thoughts to leap into his or her head is, "Will it take away my job?" And people have been asking it for a really long time. The tension between machine learning and human intellect has been routinely reflected in popular media: In our past two entries in this series, we did call-outs to an Avengers movie, Star Trek and Mad Men for their takes on AI as a nefarious change agent who'll suck the humanism out of our lives. But as far back as the 1950s, the notion that computers might supplant us in the workplace was very much on people's minds. So much so it was a comic premise of a 1957 Tracy-Hepburn comedy, Desk Set.

One of the highlights of last week's Content2Conversion conference was a keynote by the always-stimulating Tim Riesterer of Corporate Visions, who argued that an effective sales presentation should (1) start with an unfamiliar factoid that shows why change is essential (a concept similar to the CEB "challenger sale") (2) show that you have a solution and (c) contrast your solution with other approaches to clarify how it's different and better. Riesterer's own talk followed exactly that template, a bit of consistency I always admire. This in turn got me thinking about my presentation on machine learning systems at the MarTech conference in March. I pretty much finished drafting it last week, but it was still an interesting exercise to imagine recasting it along the lines Riesterer proposed. Linear thinker that I am, this meant first looking for an appropriate factoid about why the growth of machine intelligence poses a threat that can't be ignored.