The future is dystopian: a world in which we humble humans will be replaced by fleets of slick automatons – mechanical menials destined to not only solder, weld and glue us out of jobs, but account, diagnose, and translate us out, too. Or, so goes a certain line of argument. Certainly, there have been some heavyweight concerns voiced about the rise of artificial intelligence. Of course, there are counterarguments too. Just as the Industrial Revolution sparked fears around the supplanting of man by machine (fears which lead some as far as destroying the new mechanical marvels: hence today's use of the word'Luddite' to denote those opposed to technological progress), all new vistas are likely to provoke both optimism and hesitance.

The future is dystopian: a world in which we humble humans will be replaced by fleets of slick automatons – mechanical menials destined to not only solder, weld and glue us out of jobs, but account, diagnose, and translate us out, too. Or, so goes a certain line of argument. Certainly, there have been some heavyweight concerns voiced about the rise of artificial intelligence. Of course, there are counterarguments too. Just as the Industrial Revolution sparked fears around the supplanting of man by machine (fears which lead some as far as destroying the new mechanical marvels: hence today's use of the word'Luddite' to denote those opposed to technological progress), all new vistas are likely to provoke both optimism and hesitance.

Hawking, Berners-Lee and Zuckerberg have all given their warnings. The fear is of a future where artificial intelligence (AI) drives the decisions in major corporations, and machines become so competent and clever that they take up our jobs. Already we're seeing how AI is impacting several businesses including IBM, Google, Amazon and Apple - through image recognition, speech understanding and the mining of large data sets. The sophistication of AI is even being leveraged to make decisions on what messages to show consumers, and creating bespoke messaging depending on what it thinks will be interesting, relevant and useful. Clearly the next frontier of brand and consumer interaction is upon us.