Consumers often don't understand AI's power and impact. "AI is just everywhere in our lives today and the average consumer has no clue how it works or what undermines the technology," Roetzer told me. We need help understanding what responsible AI looks like. Tech companies don't have all the answers. The burden of building and using AI responsibly falls on technology companies, which don't always have incentives to build systems that prioritize people over profit.

"What we're hearing from our friends and thought leaders in this space that pay close attention to the regulations is just behave as though you're under the European Union's AI Act guidelines, whether you're in Europe, America, or anywhere else," says Roetzer. Regulations like the AI Act will be used as a template by other governments soon. You can't avoid issues around responsible and ethical AI. Regulations will force you to act. Even if you're an AI beginner, you'll quickly run into ethical issues around data, how it's used, and who provides it. You need an AI ethics policy or guidelines.

Adobe is one of the first, but it won't be the last. Adobe has no choice but to innovate, says Roetzer. "You need generative image capabilities baked within Adobe products," he says. This AI arms race means one thing: No matter how you feel about generative AI, it will be a part of any creative tool or platform you use moving forward. In the process, it will disrupt how creators do their work across industries. Generative AI will disrupt different industries at different speeds, says Roetzer. "If you're in a highly conservative, highly regulated industry like healthcare, it's probably not going to move as fast," he says.

Marketing is one of the areas of business operations where it is widely predicted that artificial intelligence (AI) will drive enormous change. In fact, a McKinsey study found that, along with sales, it is the single business function where it will have the most financial impact. This means that if you're a marketer and you're not using AI, you're missing out on the benefits of what is possibly the most transformational technology. Actually, though, the chances that there are people out there doing marketing today and not using AI in any shape or form is somewhat unlikely. This is simply because there are so many tools with AI features that we are used to using without even thinking about it.

Paul Roetzer, founder and CEO of the Marketing AI Institute, said that marketing AI is the "science of making marketing smart." Notice he didn't say "automate things." Marketing AI is not marketing automation, and therein lies an important point – a lot of marketers still don't understand what AI brings to the table for marketing. Roetzer's Institute, in partnership with Drift, a provider of conversational AI solutions, recently published 2021 The State of Marketing AI. It's a survey that looked at how marketing AI is in use today, the most common use cases, and where companies see themselves using AI in the next five years. Yes, we've been having lots of conversations around AI (Artificial Intelligence) for years.

With an average open email rate of 18.0% in 2020, it's not like marketing teams are crushing this email thing. Wait, isn't 18% pretty good? We get that standards are low here, for sure. About four billion people have an inbox. It's a tough sell to abandon that marketing strategy.

Marketers see great potential value in using artificial intelligence (AI) to support the use case of recommending highly targeted content to users in real time. That use case scored the highest among 49 use cases presented to marketers in the 2021 State of Marketing AI report by Drift and the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute. That use case scored a 3.96, putting it on the cusp of "high value" (4.0), with 5.0 being "transformative." The AI marketing use cases that trailed in the top five include: "Most websites you go to today for businesses, a human is writing the rules to say which content to recommend," Paul Roetzer, CEO and founder of the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute, told CMSWire in a CX Decoded Podcast. "What are the related articles? There is some basic tagging system for if they read this, then read that. Most of them are human-powered. They don't have a Netflix or a Spotify type algorithm that's actually learning preferences, knows the last 15 articles someone read, and how far along he got into them. Therein lies potential, however it's something marketers and customer experience professionals remain hopeful about: 54% of them told CMSWire researchers in the State of Digital Customer Experience 2021 report they see AI having significant impacts on digital customer experience over the next two to five years. And most of them see "gaining actionable customer insights" (27%) as the area where they see the most potential. Roetzer said it is hard to find really good solutions to do this out-of-the-box. Noz Urbina of Urbina Consulting agreed, calling the technology nascent. The bigger question for marketers beyond what kind of tools are out there is do we have the data to support the use case, according to Roetzer. And do we have a strong foundation of metadata, content tagging and content taxonomies, according to Urbina. "You need enough data, for one," Roetzer said. "Sometimes the problem is smaller data, not necessarily the cost.

Marketers see great potential value in using artificial intelligence (AI) to support the use case of recommending highly targeted content to users in real time. That use case scored the highest among 49 use cases presented to marketers in the 2021 State of Marketing AI report by Drift and the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute. That use case scored a 3.96, putting it on the cusp of "high value" (4.0), with 5.0 being "transformative." "Most websites you go to today for businesses, a human is writing the rules to say which content to recommend," Paul Roetzer, CEO and founder of the Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute, told CMSWire in a CX Decoded Podcast. "What are the related articles? There is some basic tagging system for if they read this, then read that. Most of them are human-powered. They don't have a Netflix or a Spotify type algorithm that's actually learning preferences, knows the last 15 articles someone read, and how far along he got into them. Therein lies potential, however it's something marketers and customer experience professionals remain hopeful about: 54% of them told CMSWire researchers in the State of Digital Customer Experience 2021 report they see AI having significant impacts on digital customer experience over the next two to five years. And most of them see "gaining actionable customer insights" (27%) as the area where they see the most potential. Roetzer said it is hard to find really good solutions to do this out-of-the-box. Noz Urbina of Urbina Consulting agreed, calling the technology nascent. The bigger question for marketers beyond what kind of tools are out there is do we have the data to support the use case, according to Roetzer. And do we have a strong foundation of metadata, content tagging and content taxonomies, according to Urbina. "You need enough data, for one," Roetzer said. "Sometimes the problem is smaller data, not necessarily the cost.

If you watch Netflix, listen to music via Spotify, or have bought a product via Amazon, you will have interacted with machine learning or AI at some level. Much of what you watch, listen to or buy comes from recommendations made by AI algorithms. More and more, algorithms are helping us to make both subtle and important life altering decisions. So, what does this mean for marketers? They are an AI-first company.

Marketing Artificial Intelligence Institute announced the launch of AI Academy for Marketers, an online education platform that helps marketers understand, pilot and scale artificial intelligence. AI Academy for Marketers is designed for marketing professionals and students at all levels, and largely caters to non-technical audiences, meaning registrants do not need backgrounds in analytics, data science or programming to understand and apply what they learn. The Academy features deep-dive Certification Courses (3 – 5 hours each), along with dozens of Short Courses (30 – 60 minutes each) taught by leading AI and marketing experts. The courses are complemented by additional exclusive content, including: live monthly Ask Me Anything sessions with instructors, the Answering AI series of quick-take videos that provide simple answers to common AI questions, keynote presentations from the Marketing AI Conference (MAICON), and AI Tech Showcase product demos from leading AI-powered vendors. New content will be regularly added to the platform, and all members get access to a private online community Slack group to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing with their peers.