Last year I asked myself the question, is bigger really better? Even though visitors to the DMEXCO declined for the first time last year, it was still a little bit overwhelming. This year's DMEXCO was still a big event with major players from the industry, interesting debates, great workshops and talks. However, it felt like a little less crowded – not a bad thing. In true German style, if you arrive a minute late to your sessions the doors would be closed, so, my "planning ahead" skills were very much needed.

"So, what should we be doing about Artificial Intelligence" says the CEO as you share an elevator ride to the fifth floor. A reasonable enough question, given that according to Forbes, 53% of marketers plan to adopt artificial intelligence in the next two years[1]. But it would be understandable if at this point a short journey became a very long and awkward one as you "umm-ed" and "ahh-ed" through the unknowns, uncertainties and unfathomable complexities of a topic you know you, as a marketer, need a point of view on, but haven't yet got around to grasping. Fortunately, it's more important to have a coherent view on AI than for that view to be right, as no-one can know for sure what the'correct' view is – the topic is too fresh, too dynamic and with too many unknowns for a single, authoritative interpretation to exist. So how do you form that coherent view?

Loyal readers know that I have frequently written about "the dawn of the robots" (which is the title of a Science Fiction book by famed author Isaac Asimov). A recent flurry of articles on the subject of our automated future has more than strengthened my belief that it will be A.I. 1 – Humanity 0 in the foreseeable future. It is not that I don't see the business benefits from automation or artificial intelligence. It is undoubtedly true that the Weather Channel app has become infinitely more accurate with the help of IBM's Watson. And now Watson will do my tax returns, too, courtesy of H&R Block.