Technology is advancing at an accelerated rate, and the far-fetched dreams of yesterday are quickly becoming the innovations of today. For the longest time, artificial intelligence was an ambiguous notion of big ideas with futuristic applications -- self-driving cars, drone deliveries, fridges that monitor food quality, and so much more. This rapid pace of innovation has some theorists concerned with "singularity" -- the belief that artificial super-intelligence will cause such rapid growth that human civilization will experience incomprehensible change. Some theorists predict that, at its current rate, singularity could come about in the next 30 years. My point here isn't to focus on if or when singularity will happen, but rather to convey that we are currently experiencing the impact of technological progress in our day-to-day lives and in the world of digital advertising.

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Creating an automation strategy should be top of mind in 2019 – indeed, it was identified by 61 percent of marketers as the top priority for optimizing marketing automation efforts in a recent industry survey. Researchers also identified the delivery of personalized content and integration of marketing systems as the most challenging barriers to your success with marketing technology. SEO and Automation is a big part of the solution. Automation is critical in making informed, data-driven decisions in a world in which the amount of data companies are attempting to manage is unprecedented. But we're at the point now where, as marketers have attempted to automate various tasks, many are struggling with unwieldy stacks of different technologies all vying for resources and budget.

Across industries and in nearly every vertical, AI is driving digital transformation. In sales, for example, 70% of US-based professionals are now using some form of AI at work. In marketing, platforms like IBM's Watson Marketing, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, and Pega's Unified DMP are bringing brands closer than ever before to their customers. Project scheduling optimizers for engineering, telecommunications AI that recognize early signs of churn, and personalized gaming experiences based on in-game data are just a few of the ways AI is disrupting major industries today. AI is no longer the exclusive domain of massive enterprise with equally outsized R&D budgets, either. Intelligent automation is now accessible to even the smallest of businesses; call it entry-level AI, if you will.

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Twitter announced on Monday it has acquired Fabula AI, a London-based machine learning research company. Fabula AI's team will join Twitter and work alongside Sandeep Pandey as part of Twitter's research group focused on natural language processing, reinforcement learning, machine learning ethics, recommendation systems and graph deep learning. Fabula's graph deep learning research is used to detect network manipulation. With this acquisition, Twitter aims to use Fabula's capabilities to better identify bad actors and malicious behavior on the platform, in addition to enhancing its recommendations processes. While the Fabula research team will initially focus on improving the health of conversations happening on Twitter, the company said the team's efforts will expand in the future, aiming to help stop spam and abuse, as well as improve recommendations, the explore tab and the onboarding experience.

When it comes to automation, many agencies are ambivalent about the technology. Marketing Land's own digital agency survey found 72 percent of respondents indicated "neutral" when asked how they felt about automation. I was not all that surprised by this high number based on my own agency experience. On one hand, we're just trying to keep up with the abundance of client requests and the superspeed of change in the industry. Most of the time there is more demand for work than there are people who actually know how to do it. So I'm also not surprised that the survey found 70 percent of agency respondents are hiring.

Google remains at the forefront of developments in many areas that have the potential to disrupt local search. Artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), the internet of things (IoT), voice search and cloud technology are all being increasingly used by consumers and businesses alike. Yet there is one area where Google doesn't sit in pole position: social media. Google has made several attempts to get some traction in social media: Orkut, Dodgeball, Buzz, Latitude. The fact that you likely don't recognize these names says enough about their success.

As 2019 gets underway and your marketing plan unfolds, you've probably set some goals for the coming year: We're going to break down the data silos that keep us from understanding our customers. We're going to improve our messaging relevance. We're going to target customers more accurately on their preferred channels What if you could just find the time to make any one of these resolutions a reality? Although the promise of one-to-one marketing has been around for many years, brands still send customers too many marketing messages that are irrelevant, generic or only slightly personalized. The problem is that marketers today have too much data and not enough creative time to respond to soaring customer expectations for a personalized buying experience. Enter artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning-based marketing tools that are changing the nature of how marketers make decisions and deploy campaigns.

Personalization has become integral to the customer journey and is now a key driver of brand loyalty across all channels. Consumers are much more likely to buy from brands – both in-store and online – when offers are personalized. And it's not just your brand communications that need to be more relevant: consumers are also interested in purchasing more personalized products and services, and are willing to wait longer to get them. You know more about your customers than ever before. But isn't one of your biggest challenges how to make sense of all that customer data so your marketing messages can be more targeted and relevant?