It's no secret that the market is on shaky ground in 2022. We are experiencing wild swings, especially in the tech sector. According to Bankrate, 82% of investors are investing less in 2022 than they did in 2021. We know that buying high and selling low is not the way to generate the best long-term returns, but it's easier said than done. Luckily, there are a couple of tried-and-true strategies that our future selves will thank us for. First, we don't need to time the bottom; that's nearly impossible.

With so much death and economic destruction wrought by the novel coronavirus, it's hard to find the silver lining. But if there is one on Wall Street, it's the rise of artificial intelligence stocks. Yes, there is the profitability angle from machine learning and other relevant technology facilitates. But this crisis has been a crash course in the sector's viability. Hopefully, we won't suffer a second wave like many European countries are experiencing because, you know, people can just get over themselves and wear a flipping mask in public.

"Data-Driven Thinking" is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today's column is written by Jacob Beck, programmatic media specialist at DWA Media. Already, the AI ecosystem has grown crowded, especially as it relates to managing programmatic spend. Demand-side platforms (DSPs), supply-side platforms, dynamic creative providers and others are all working together to bring AI into the mainstream of programmatic, where it promises to make advertising more relevant for both consumers and brands. Companies, particularly those in the B2B space, are only beginning to grasp the scope and scale of how AI can influence their marketing programs.

The Trade Desk is using artificial intelligence to give marketers a clearer picture of where their programmatic dollars actually go. The ad platform announced three new tools on Tuesday meant to simplify the programmatic buying process and better predict who exactly advertisers can expect to reach ahead of each campaign. The rollout comes as brands have grown frustrated with the often-opaque nature of placing and measuring large-scale automated advertising results. "We feel that we've revamped the user experience--we've adopted a new and transparent form of AI, and we think that this is going to make many of the complexities of programmatic much, much simpler for everyone," said Kathleen Comer, The Trade Desk's vp of client services. "We think that's going to impact the future of programmatic because buying will be much more simple, more intuitive. And when buying becomes more simple and intuitive, it becomes more scalable, which is infinitely important."

Salesforce has officially unveiled Einstein, a set of artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities it says will help users of its platform serve their customers better. Billing the technology as "AI for everyone", Salesforce is putting Einstein's capabilities into all its clouds, bringing machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics, and natural language processing into each piece of its customer relationship management platform. In Salesforce's Sales Cloud, for instance, machine learning will power predictive lead scoring, a new tool that can analyse all data related to leads -- including standard and custom fields, activity data from sales reps, and behavioural activity from prospects -- to generate a predictive score for each lead. The models will continuously improve over time by learning from signals like lead source, industry, job title, Web clicks and emails. Another tool will analyse CRM data combined with customer interactions such as inbound emails from prospects to identify buying signals earlier in the sales process and recommend next steps to increase the sales rep's ability to close a deal.