In a recent column, New York Times technology correspondent Kevin Roose revealed a conversation he had shared with Bing's Chatbot that's equal parts fascinating and unsettling. The artificial intelligence service in question is a sibling of the popular ChatGPT, produced by the American artificial intelligence company OpenAI. But Roose wasn't just chatting with the OpenAI Codex, the company's most recent model, he was speaking with its chat mode persona, Sydney, a name given to it by Microsoft in its early stages of development. Though Roose and Sydney's conversation is, at first glance, alarming, the AI's responses to Roose's questions are far from unexpected. Its erratic use of emojis and seemingly unfiltered, emotional way of speaking feels human because, in some ways, it is – just not in the way our cultural anxieties over artificial intelligence might lead us to believe (Olson, 2023).

In this week's episode of Growth Interviews, we invite you to join our podcast conversation with Jim Sterne, internationally known speaker, author of a dozen books on advertising, marketing, customer service, email marketing and web analytics, founder of the Marketing Analytics Summit (eMetrics Summit), the Marketing Evolution Experience and co-founder of the Digital Analytics Association. Welcome to Growth Interviews, the fun, stimulating and engaging series of conversations driven by digital business growth. Our mission is to provide valuable insights from the eCommerce arena, and each episode is a fascinating quest into the best-kept business secrets and money-making strategies of an insightful world-class expert. Jim Sterne sold business computers to first-time owners in the 1980s, consulted and keynoted about online marketing in the 1990s, founded a conference and a professional association around digital analytics in the 2000s and founded the Marketing Analytics Summit (formerly eMetrics Summit), chairing 100 conferences around the world. An internationally known speaker and consultant to Fortune 500 companies and Internet entrepreneurs, Jim has spent more than twenty years in sales and marketing and most of that on measuring the value of Digital medium for creating and strengthening customer relationships.

From market research to direct mail metrics to web analytics to Big Data, the job of "marketing" has changed dramatically over time. We have arrived at a fundamental shift in marketing that is as impactful as the advent of the Internet: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. This workshop introduces marketing professionals of all ranks to the theory, the language and the practical application of these disruptive technologies. This workshop will not teach you how to be a data scientist. It will teach you enough about the language and implications to speak cogently with your colleagues, and determine where to apply this innovative technology first.

Artificial Intelligence for marketing is not unlike CBD oil. It comes with a hodgepodge of unrealistic expectations, misapplications, misunderstandings, and mysteries. "The hype around artificial intelligence and machine learning is overwhelming," says Jim Sterne, founder eMetrics Summit/Marketing Analytics Summit at Rising Media, Inc. "If cars can drive themselves and robots can open doors and run through the snow, then surely, machines will be able to do everything a marketing professional does by tomorrow afternoon." Pinar Yildirim, assistant professor of marketing at Wharton, agrees. "We have a lot of hype, but the technology is not there yet. What is being implemented are mostly the tools that we have known for a long, long time. What is different now is the scale and scope of implementation - these known methods are implemented by a larger group of companies internally, and the data to implement them are more readily available within firms."