In the discussion of automation and machine learning, there is certainly one crucial question, for sales and for everyone: is the future dominated by humans or machines? I truly believe there will be such a decision, and it will have to be made in the not-too-distant future. As we discussed in our last article, humans can be sloppy, late, incorrect, inconsistent, and--in comparison to machines--only work part of the time. For that reason we know we're depending more and more on machines. We have reached a point of no return, now, for there are machines today that if we suddenly had to do without would mean the end of an industry.

In our last article we discussed the fact that automation and algorithms are created by humans, and so, therefore, can be biased. For our final article on the subject of automation and where it's taking us, we want to examine the human's role in the automated society, and how important it is for us to fully understand it. The Industrial Revolution brought machines to common use in the world. Where you might have had 50 people engaged in a certain task, those 50 people were then replaced by 1 machine. When all was said and done, though, you still had a human being controlling what the machine was doing.

It is Sales & Marketing Alignment month on SalesPOP! So continuing our series on artificial intelligence, let's now take a look at AI and how it fits in with Sales & Marketing Alignment. As we know by evaluating the current state of Sales & Marketing Alignment, it is still a major challenge to get these two groups working in unity. Yet in today it's vital that they do–if only because in today's digital marketplace it's getting more and more difficult to tell where exactly Marketing ends and Sales begins. Although there are clear opinions on the subject, we have never totally solved the question of lead generation being specifically a Marketing or a Sales activity.