In the late 18th century, Wolfgang von Kempelen amazed the world with his chess playing automaton, the Mechanical Turk, as it defeated worthy opponents including Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin.

Looker CMO, Jennifer Grant, is eager to test machine learning on its website and investigate new martech tools to see how the company can continue to optimise and grow the business.

​Brands that don’t get on the front foot with a voice strategy will be missing out on a significant share of the market.

Discussion of the use of artificial intelligence in the workplace today inevitably leads to questions about the role it will play – and what might happen to those people who previously performed those roles.

Digital transformation projects are normally pursued for their ability to improve engagement between an organisation and its customers. But there is much to be said for their ability to boost staff engagement levels too.

No one would doubt it’s been a tough decade for retailers, and many have failed in the face of digital disruption and transformation. But for Salesforce senior VP of retail and consumer goods, Shelley Bransten, the rise of relationship-based engagement is offering up reasons to be increasingly optimistic about the retail market moving forward.

Denmark-based Danske Bank Group is using a ‘one-tribe’ approach to push its data analytics strategy in order to improve operations and enhance customer experiences.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will mediate with brands on behalf of consumers, and people will form personal relationships with AI.

Machine learning has become one of the hottest topics in marketing circles in 2018, as organisations strive to understand what it can do and how it works. But as with most emerging technologies, there is limited experience in market against which to make decisions.

Alibaba Group is powering ahead with a range of AI research and initiatives in a bid to realise its vision: To make it easy to do business everywhere and anywhere.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is here to stay. And while brands are in varying stages of maturity with AI projects and strategies, there’s one common principle: The nascent technology needs to meet customer expectations in a simple and useful manner.

Marketers with blind faith in adtech and martech are at risk of putting advertising in front of people who were going to buy anyway and waste time and money on useless personalisation activities.

Using artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and target specific consumer groups via social media insights and loyalty data has seen Australian chocolateria, San Churro, chalk up 6.6 per cent return on investment and a predicted $500,000 in additional in-store spend.

The sophistication of the Australian digital market, plus the rapid rate local marketers have embraced personalisation and metrics, is phenomenal, global leaders from the Oracle Data Cloud team believe. Now, they say, it’s up the marketers globally to ask the right questions about where they want this technology to go.

UBank’s CMO says the launch of RoboBrain, a hyper-personalised cognitive assistant, is dramatically improving customer response times and a massive leap forward in the bank’s AI journey.

As head of marketing during one of the biggest tech mergers in the history of IT, Dell EMC’s Helen Dean has had a pretty big and intense year. And while it wasn’t exactly a walk in the park, she describes it as a surprisingly smooth transition thanks to a strategic approach to communication and culture.

Once upon a time, meeting a partner online was not seen as conducive to a happily ever after. In fact, it was seen as a forbidden forest. However, in the modern age of time poor, stressed-out professionals, meeting someone online is not only seen as essential, it can also be considered to be the more scientific way to go about the happy ending.

This time last year, I wrote that advancements in technology will impact society, not just marketing. This year, that seems to be a strong flavour of many of the topics being presented at SXSW.

Jodie Sangster will join the IBM Watson team as CMO AI program leader as part of a new triumvirate of executives tasked with helping the Asia-Pacific marketing and commerce communities get a better handle on the application of artificial intelligence.

Paints, garden care and home improvement manufacturer, DuluxGroup, is upping its investment into machine learning and algorithmic-based virtual assistance technology and signed an expanded partnership with Complexica.

AMP is on a quest to deliver enhanced ‘customer experiences’ and is using the power of artificial intelligence (AI) - as part of the recent Salesforce platform adoption - in order to offer ‘mass personalisation’ to customers and advisers.