The viral popularity of ChatGPT, a language model chatbot, has thrown generative AI into the mainstream. The technology, developed by OpenAI, has captured the imagination of more than a million users. From asking for cocktail recipes to penning a love song, users have been experimenting with ChatGPT's instant conversational responses. However, it is the potential that generative AI has in business that has got investors excited. According to data from PitchBook, generative AI investment has increased by as much as 425% from 2020 to December 2022, reaching a total figure of $2.1bn last year – a particularly impressive feat considering a wider downturn in tech investment in 2022.

Fully understanding consumer behaviour can be very challenging for marketers. In light of recent high-profile cases of personal data misuse, customers have been increasingly sceptical about giving up their personal data, preferring to share content privately through messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Snapchat or Messenger. At the same time, GDPR regulations mean businesses are unable to use vast quantities of data they collect on customers without their express permission. This means that, rather than offering personalisation, marketers have to rely on creating "personas" – types of customers they can target who don't require personally identifiable information. Coupled with this, they are increasingly turning to the latest augmented or artificial intelligence technologies to build a better picture of consumers and how they are likely to behave in their decision making. One company at the forefront of the AI revolution, IBM, has reinvented its offerings over the course of a century.

It's time to take a step back from the noise and hype surrounding artificial intelligence (AI). Businesses have been inundated with AI sales pitches promoting the technology's potential to automate tasks, increase speed and accuracy and cut costs. Most businesses lack a vision of how AI will transform their operations. Rather than the piecemeal adoption of AI systems, some believe businesses need to develop an overarching strategy for how to embed AI in their organisation over time. "The most important thing is having a comprehensive and holistic view of AI sourcing within the organisation," says Mohammed Chaara, a former Lenovo strategist who is now "an evangelist" for AI.

The world is going to change more over the next five years than it has over the last fifteen. That, at least, is the opinion of Jeremy Waites, who describes himself as just a lowly storyteller, traveling around to telling tales about cool stuff. Officially that makes him an evangelist, and the'cool stuff' on which he evangelises is IBM's AI system, Watson. I met up with him at the recent Cloud Expo in London to discuss some of the wider issues about where AI fits in the business and wider world, what it can bring to those parties, and what impact it might have on the way work changes – or indeed continues to exist. Like a growing number of people in the AI business Waites is keen to stress that the'A' does not stand for'Artificial', but rather for'Augmented', on the basis that the former carries with it all those scary, sci-fi connotations.