Weber Shandwick's report AI-Ready or Not: Artificial Intelligence here we come!, released this week, shows that top global marketers believe AI will have an even bigger impact on comms than social media. Gorkana asks Weber and other agencies, including Firefly, Hotwire PR and Babel, what they think about the AI'revolution'. According to Weber Shandwick's report, AI is defined as the following: "[AI] is a field of technology designed to create computers, machines and software that are as smart as humans, and which are able to perform the same tasks that normally require human intelligence." It surveyed 150 chief marketing officers across the UK, US and China and more than half of them (55%) expect AI to have'a greater impact on marketing and communications than social media ever had'. Nearly six in ten (58%) of respondents believe that within the next five years companies will need to compete in the AI space to succeed. Furthermore, 68% of the CMOs reported that their company is currently selling, using or planning for business in the AI area.

We spoke to Paul Davies, UK CMO at Microsoft and one of our Vision 100 on what it takes to be a visionary. Davies said it takes a lot of curiosity and that visionaries need to be curious about the world around them and what makes people tick. He said that they should also have courage and the bravery to try different things. He said he admires the astronaut Tim Peake for "inspiring a young generation and telling them they really can do anything with their lives." When asked what he feels the biggest change will be for the industry in the next ten years, he said it would be artificial intelligence, with "data being pulled together in different ways to create new experiences for consumers in ways that will be invisible."

Brands need to be "waking up" up to the potential of bots and be aware of sensors, the cloud and machine learning as we approach the "fourth industrial revolution", Microsoft's UK chief marketing officer told The Drum. Paul Davies, who spoke on the Advertising Week Europe panel dubbed'How smart cities will transform advertising', explained how Microsoft is already looking to an automated, connected future when designing and collaborating on innovations. "We have an app experience for people who are visually impaired, which is powered through bluetooth sensors to help them walk around all the way, through an electric car sharing company called Autolib," he said. "Their mission is to reduce the number of cars in Paris by 25,000 in the next seven years...using data and the cloud to empower that." Davies believes the world is "on the cusp of the fourth industrial revolution, the digital revolution".