People sometimes think of artificial intelligence (AI) as the natural language processing they saw in HAL 9000 in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey or the chess-playing computer Deep Blue that beat Garry Kasparov in 1997. Others see AI as the synthetic human intelligence engineered into a friendly voice interface and software, like Apple's Siri. By contrast, in the enterprise environment, AI for customer marketing offers a far more practical, personal, immediate and business-oriented application. Effective customer marketing is about analyzing billions of signals and automating analytics on a bottom-up basis. It results in highly personal marketing, pairing the right product and offer at the right time to a defined group of people.

AI in customer marketing is about analyzing billions of signals and automating analytics on a bottom-up basis. It results in highly personal marketing, pairing the right product and offer at the right time to a defined group of people. Questions about individual and group behavior abound. "Like" for those irritating Millennials, what offer would induce a first-time purchase and which product would be ideal as a complimentary purchase? How many and which products are clustered into a typical purchase?