Pekka Koskinen is the CEO & Founder of Leadfeeder, a lead generation software. Did you know that the number of marketers adopting AI technology grew by 44% between 2017 and 2018? At Leadfeeder, we use machine learning to filter ISPs and nonrelevant hostnames out of the lead data we provide to customers. LinkedIn's VP of artificial intelligence, Deepak Agarwal, has even gone on record declaring that "at LinkedIn, AI is like oxygen." Compared to the collective and growing enthusiasm, however, AI's actual implementation has been relatively low.

It appears that 2019 is the year when the union between Artificial Intelligence and sales has finally evolved. While this relationship began to gain momentum last year, applications that married the two were limited. Recent research has shown that more than half of CRM users believe that the most important factor for a good CRM is ease of use. A CRM that isn't easy to use simply won't be used by employees. That is the reason why adoption rates among end users are still as low as 25%, despite growth in CRM purchases, according to Salesforce.

While 2018 saw the artificial intelligence sales revolution beginning to gain momentum, the applications were limited. In 2018, the percentage increased by a mere 2% to 53% adoption. This year, artificial intelligence will increasingly play a vital role in sales organizations. One of the most profound implications will be in the context of CRMs. CRMs have long struggled to gain the favor of sales professionals.

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Carl Landers, SVP of Marketing and CMO at Conversica, illustrates how companies are leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning in the sales process. From fraud detection to online retail recommendations and self-driving cars, artificial intelligence (AI) applications are increasingly prevalent in our day-to-day interactions and business dealings. Companies are even using it to attract, nurture and retain customers. Key Accounts are complex, global behemoths. The old ways of managing them just won't do.

Maybe you haven't noticed, but artificial intelligence has arrived. Gradually, over the last decade or so, it's become so ingrained into our everyday lives that most people don't think twice about it. Spotify assembles a "Discover Weekly" playlist tailored to your tastes. Netflix serves you options for your next binge-watching marathon. Alexa answers your questions and plays that nifty Spotify playlist on command.

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InsideSales, the Utah-based tech unicorn is betting big on artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics with its two latest products which hint towards the future of the company. Since being founded in 2004, InsideSales has built its products on its Neuralytics engine, which processes a rich pool of billions of anonymised sales transactions that enterprise customers can tap into and enrich with their own proprietary data. The company's first application for Neuralytics was for the sales industry, giving reps smart suggestions on when and where to contact leads to better close deals through smarter prospect scoring. Read next: Insidesales.com, the big data unicorn that is transforming the sales industry with its predictive cloud Now, CEO Dave Elkington compares the evolution of the InsideSales platform to that of Netflix or Amazon. You don't tell Netflix you like horror movies and therefore would like to see more of them, the algorithms do it for you.

Salesforce will introduce artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive capabilities into its customer relationship management (CRM) product as soon as October as it starts to roll our Einstein across its cloud products. During a phone question and answer session last week general manager of Einstein, John Ball, said: "You will see [Einstein] powering AI across all of our clouds and there are many features coming. We do three releases a year and Einstein will be powering every release from now on, starting with the winter release in October." Salesforce is being coy in terms of pricing, saying that some capabilities will come with existing cloud licenses and editions, and some coming at a premium. The pricing of each feature will only be known once it is made generally available, except Community Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Analytics Cloud capabilities, which are included in existing licenses and detailed below.