The chief of the wildly profitable Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud computing unit will step down next month after a three-year term. Adam Selipsky, 57, who is also a member of Amazon's team advising CEO, will leave the company on 3 June, according to an Amazon statement on Tuesday. He will be replaced by Matt Garman, a senior vice-president who has overseen sales and marketing at AWS. Selipsky has spent 14 years at AWS over two stints. He was the CEO of Tableau Software, a unit of Salesforce, from 2016 to 2021, when he was tapped to take over the division from Jassy, who had been appointed Amazon CEO. Under Selipsky's leadership, AWS saw rapid growth, doubling sales of 45.4bn from the year before his appointment to 90.8bn in 2023 and nearly doubling operating income to 24.6bn over that period.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have become vital to many aspects of financial services, from powering chatbots to improving fraud detection. But one area where AI has not gained as much traction, particularly with community financial institutions, is in sales and marketing. Its use has been steadily ramping up, though: SouthState Bank and Eglin Federal Credit Union are among those using AI to parse data in ways that have resulted in much greater impact for their marketing efforts. Rather than targeting people based on simple demographics like age or gender, they combine internal data with information available beyond their own databases to surface a much more telling -- read: predictive -- combination of details. The key benefit has been the ability to more accurately identify when customers are ready to buy a particular financial product and deliver the appropriate messaging to them.

Katie King is a published Author, Keynote Speaker, Trainer, and Consultant on Artificial Intelligence (AI), marketing, and business transformation. Katie has over 30 years of consulting experience and has advised many of the world's leading brands and business leaders. Kogan Page published her second book in January 2022: AI Strategy for Sales and Marketing: Connecting marketing, sales, and customer experience. Her first book, Using Artificial Intelligence in Marketing: How to Harness AI and Maintain the Competitive Edge, was translated into Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese & other languages. It was also listed as a reference source in the'Brand Strategy' section of the World Economic Forum's Empowering AI Leadership AI toolkit for corporate boards.

One particular subdiscipline, conversational AI, is paving the way for systems capable of holding a discussion at a human-like level, opening UP various doors in fields from customer services to sales and marketing. However, when it's no longer possible to distinguish between man and machine, a whole host of issues are bound to crop up, especially if AI models have not been developed and audited in a responsible manner. To hear more about the opportunities associated with conversational AI, as well as the potential pitfalls, we spoke to Dinesh Nirmal, head of data, AI and automation at IBM. Conversational AI refers to the different types of AI software or solutions that are designed for people to talk to and communicate with. We train conversational AI using vast amounts of input data, essentially language and phrases that teach it how to recognize words and imitate human interactions. In a business context, this is useful in many different situations, especially customer care.

Every organization is looking for more leads, increased conversions, and ultimately increased revenue. The better that sales and marketing teams work in concert, the higher the chances that all of these occur. Call scoring can be an essential part of aligning sales and marketing. But researchers and business leaders alike regularly reflect on what they can do to synchronize sales and marketing–two critically important departments. One of the ways organizations can achieve sales and marketing alignment is through call scoring and looking at organizations that engage with customers and prospects over the phone.

I recently presented the plenary session at a pharma conference covering how Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming pharma sales and marketing, I provided examples Eularis had completed for pharma client projects. Several of the attendees sent me emails afterwards wanting to know more about the specific examples I gave, which were as varied as our client needs. It was interesting to learn how few of these types of applications they were familiar with, and I thought the readers of my white papers would want to know about them, too. I've written about many of these topics before, and I'm including those links at the end of each section in case you are interested in digging deeper into a specific topic. According to Takeda Pharmaceuticals, the average time taken to diagnose a rare disease without technology is 7.6 years and comes after countless tests and physician visits. This creates a high cost to the healthcare system, not to mention much suffering for the patient. And some cases are even worse.

Darktrace is a well-oiled sales and marketing machine, as slick and turbocharged as the multimillion-pound McLaren Formula One sponsorship deal it uses to entice prospective clients, and yet the cybersecurity company continues to be overshadowed by questions about its technology and founding investor. On the face of it, Darktrace is a great British tech success story. It was founded in Cambridge nine years ago by an alliance of mathematicians, former spies from GCHQ and artificial intelligence (AI) experts. Its market value hit almost £7bn within months of its stock market float last April as investors clamoured for a stake in the promise of a rare European superpower in the US-dominated cybersecurity space. And yet Darktrace has been on a rollercoaster journey since then.

In today's highly competitive business world, startup companies often find it difficult to establish their niche and survive in a crowded field. Startups can compete more effectively and have a better chance of succeeding thanks to technological advances. It takes time and thought to understand how to use new technology in your startup. Planning should include a thorough analysis of the tech landscape and the decision to incorporate new developments into your business model. These are three emerging technologies that have a significant impact on startups around the globe. We also provide examples of companies that are using these new paradigms.

With the introduction of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in recent years, business owners may now be wondering how to best use it. AI is already making an impact on organizations through customer service, advertising, and marketing channels. As technology continues to advance at an exponential rate, AI will become even more integral to the success of businesses. Artificial intelligence is being used for more than just tech. With the rapid growth of AI, there are new ways for marketers to use it to grow their business.

Genesys, a global cloud leader in customer experience orchestration, announced that it has entered into agreements to acquire Pointillist and Exceed.ai to enhance its ability to deliver the power of empathy in every customer experience as it executes on the promise of Experience as a ServiceSM. Both transactions are expected to close before the end of the calendar year 2021. Genesys pioneered Experience as a Service to help companies transform how they connect with customers and employees. Companies need new technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) to orchestrate end-to-end, meaningful experiences with the objective of driving trust and loyalty. This experience orchestration provides superior business outcomes, as companies embrace more contextual, predictive and relevant experiences with every point of customer or employee contact.