I've been advising on digital marketing and new innovations for over 25 years. Since it was called Internet Marketing… This tends to make you super cynical as to new claims about marketing innovations. Over this time, many of the techniques for digital marketing and approaches to planning digital marketing strategies and campaigns have remained similar. Much Martech now promises to be be'AI-powered' while still relying on manual analysis and customizations. In fact, I'd say that it's the development of search and social media platforms that have been the main drivers of change.

Think about your buyer journey today – versus just a few years ago – and it's probably a much longer complicated affair, with more steps and opportunities to capture data. That's a daunting prospect, but it's also great news for sales and marketing teams – provided they have an effective strategy in place to combine marketing communications and automation. In partnership with Smart Insights, we've created a report titled'Win more customers with an integrated marketing communications and automation strategy.' It's a must-read for business owners, CMOs, marketing and sales directors and managers, as well as marketing technologists like CIOs who are responsible for integrating their marketing applications and data. Download the guide for the full deep-dive or read on for a quick overview.

So you've been optimizing your email programme for a while now, you've segmented your database, developed customer personas, and you've implemented a range of triggered campaigns. However, your competitors have also raised their game, and the'business as usual' option just won't cut it anymore. You're looking for something that gives you the edge and helps take email campaign performance to the next level. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is already helping marketers by serving personalized content at scale, reducing campaign production times, and enabling them to boost revenues and engagement. Forrester Research has predicted that businesses who use AI to drive marketing will gain $1.2 trillion per annum from those who don't.

Infor Coleman is a powerful artificial intelligence platform designed specifically for business users – built upon a foundation of industry-specific data. At any given moment, it can help with executing tasks, recommending next-best sales offers, and even predicting maintenance issues and adjusting production schedules accordingly. The platform is named after the inspiring physicist and mathematician Katherine Coleman Johnson, whose trail-blazing work helped U.S. astronauts land on the moon, Coleman represents a giant leap for artificial intelligence at scale.

I've spent most of my career in Business Intelligence, either as part of a technology organization developing BI tools or as an analyst using BI and analytics to make decisions. I've always been passionate about using cutting edge technology to solve business pain points, so I was very excited to join Birst to lead the development of Smart Analytics. Driven by Machine Learning, we aim to make Birst Smart Analytics usable by any business person to generate insights needed to understand what is impacting their business, without the assistance of an analyst or IT.

I've spent most of my career in Business Intelligence, either as part of a technology organization developing BI tools or as an analyst using BI and analytics to make decisions. I've always been passionate about using cutting edge technology to solve business pain points, so I was very excited to join Birst to lead the development of Smart Analytics. Driven by Machine Learning, we aim to make Birst Smart Analytics usable by any business person to generate insights needed to understand what is impacting their business, without the assistance of an analyst or IT.

In today's world of multi-layered applications generating a huge amount of telemetry data, getting Insights that will significantly shorten your Root Cause Analysis of an Incident, or even prevent it is a challenging task. In this session we'll show how we're harnessing the power of Artificial Intelligence & ML technology combined with Azure domain knowledge to drive Insights to Azure Management and Monitoring customers, and provide out of the box interactive experiences.

Despite being around for decades, AI is currently one of the most popular topics in business with Gartner predicting that by 2020 AI will be a top five investment priority for more than 20% of CIOs. Join Joey Moore, Director of Product Marketing and Greg Moore, Manager for Personalisation and Campaign Strategy of Episerver for a practical webinar on The 3 key ways to improve the customer journey. AI is currently closing the gap between detecting patterns from large data sets and predicting intent (a role traditionally reserved for human marketers and merchandizers). AI-powered technologies are replacing the manual work traditionally completed by merchandizers to make product recommendations and marketers to make ad spend decisions. For now, AI will not completely replace all human effort, but it will dramatically improve the effectiveness of ecommerce teams that use it while enhancing the experience of shoppers who purchase from AI-centered ecommerce businesses.

As we move into another new year there are once again a new set of predictions, hopes and concerns as to the direction of digital marketing over the next twelve months and beyond. There are so many exciting developments set to take place and I'm really looking forward to seeing how these take hold in 2018. One of the interesting areas I've observed across many trends is the recurrence of two themes: artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. These two closely related subjects seem to be taking hold across a number of areas, including marketing automation, digital creative, personalization and marketing technology. However, it's the influence of AI and machine learning on the future of search that I'd like to explore in some detail in this article and the potential implications on business and marketing.

Mobile marketing SEO techniques will be particularly important in 2017 with Google's recent announcements about the mobile index and AMP. We have seen huge increases in AMP smartphone traffic since September 2016 when Google rolled AMPs out beyond Google News. AMPs are targeted at publishers, but should be considered by businesses with an active blog too in my opinion.