AI and marketing: friend or foe?

I contributed to Act-On’s artificial intelligence and marketing series recently. The question was: will AI be a friend or a foe to marketers?

Here’s my take:

AI is most definitely going to be a marketer’s friend.

Marketers spend far too much time right now gathering, merging, cleansing, and normalizing data, and AI is going to make that simple. (In fact, it already is.)

In addition, the customer journey is far too complex — one company mapped 500 points on their customers’ journeys — to really understand, never mind react to in real-time with appropriate messages, resources, or services. AI will also help here, delivering on the promise of technology by enabling one-to-one communication with prospects and customers at scale.