Last year, startups developing artificial intelligence systems saw a 302% increase in funding, and since then there has been a constant stream of rumors and announcements about new AI applications for marketers. Here’s a recap of some recent news in artificial intelligence:IBM announced 6 new Watson Ecosystem partners that will “develop apps and service powered by cognitive computing”Publicis.Sapient bought a minority stake in Lucid, an artificial intelligence company that has data-analysis systems that can “reason like a human”Apple poached an AI industry leader from NVIDIAIntel acquired Saffron, a leader in cognitive computing which Intel plans on building directly into their chipsFacebook unveiled some of its AI research, which focuses on image recognition and virtual assistance through the new “M”interface in MessengerGoogle unveiled RankBrain, an artificial intelligence system that handles the 15% of searches that Google has never seen before. They also announced “Smart Reply,” a new AI feature in GMail that will automatically reply to emails.That might be too much news to take in for anyone that doesn’t fully understand artificial intelligence, so let’s take a step back and answer some questions:What is Artificial Intelligence?A popular definition of artificial intelligence is: “mimicking a human mind with a computer program.” Or, solving a problem and taking an action in the same way a human being would. For an artificially intelligent program to pass a Turing Test (or Voight-Kampff), for instance, the human performing the test has to have been fooled into believing that they are testing another human and not a computer. Pretending to be a human is only the glass ceiling of artificial intelligence, though. A less popular definition of artificial intelligence is: “creating a computer program that is better than a human mind.” Or, creating a system that can solve a problem quicker and take a more intelligent action than a human being would. And I’m afraid to say that the glass ceiling has already been shattered. Here are the many ways that robots are already taking over:There are artificial intelligence programs that can beat every human being at chess, and they’ve been around for 18 years. Sixty percent of all trades made on Wall St. today are made by computer algorithms with no human oversight. Self-flying drones have been in the air since 1995. And, in the last few months, Google has given over control of “a large fraction” of its millions of search result pages to RankBrain, an artificial intelligence system.Marketers should take special note of AI’s recent impact on search engines. Remember, search is the #1 traffic driver to all content sites, and 89% of customers begin their buying process with a search engine. RankBrain, then, is a sort of gatekeeper between marketers and consumers. If you aren’t on the AI’s good side, your content won’t be shown to anyone. To help marketers out, here is a great post with “Everything You Need To Know About RankBrain.”Not all AI systems are gatekeepers like RankBrain, though. Marketers do have some robots on their side:What do marketers currently use AI for?The most common application of artificial intelligence in the marketing industry today is found in programmatic advertising. Even while serving millions of ad impressions per day, publishers and marketers want to make sure that each impression is served to the right user at the right time for the right price. That means taking hundreds of data points into account for each ad served, such as the user’s history, what device they’re on, what time of day it is, etc.To crunch all that data and still serve every ad instantaneously, marketers turn to the artificially intelligent advertising platforms developed by companies like RocketFuel, which use machine learning methods to continuously optimize campaigns and improve their return-on-investment.Serving advertisements is only one step in the marketing process, though. Someone has to write copy for these advertisements, and that someone could be a robot. There have been some amazing developments recently in natural language processing and “robo-journalism,”or, artificial intelligence systems that compile information into human-like writing.Take Dreamwriter, for instance, a robot that writes articles in Chinese for Tencent. Or, look at Wordsmith, which “generates millions of articles per week” for the Associated Press. They even allow Wordsmith to publish directly without any human oversight.These robo-Journalists are only good for compiling information quickly and spitting out a ton of content. What marketers really want, though, is compelling content. Content that converts. For that, marketers need insights. They need to know what their audience is reacting to, what consumer questions aren’t being answered by their content, and what makes content “interesting.” Those answers are all waiting inside marketers’ Big Data, and data analytics AI can unlock it.IBM Watson is a cognitive computing system that helps identify significant trends and correlations among big sets of data. In other words, Watson is a data scientist. A really, really good one...that will work for any company...for free. Oh, and it’s very simple to use. You just upload your data (any data), and Watson automatically runs a litany of tests to find answers to every question you can think of. IBM has produced a whole ebook on how Watson can be used for content analytics, which you can find here. An alternative to Watson is Narrative Science’s Quill platform, which will actually present insights from your data in written narratives instead of numbers and graphs.Once a robo-data-scientist has taken a look at your content and told you how to make it more engaging, you might want to promote that new content on social media. But why do that yourself when you can have a robot do it? Meet Cortex, an artificial intelligence platform that handles business’ social media presence. Here’s the introduction from their site:"Cortex uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to design and execute an optimized social plan based on your historical marketing performance and the data of your competition. You tell Cortex your needs and goals and Cortex can operate autonomously for as long as you keep loading in your content."Cortex doesn’t handle creating the content or choosing what content to post, just the scheduling. For help with curating content, you could use an app like Nomibot, which uses artificial intelligence to sort through thousands of news feeds and identify noteworthy items. With an AI platform like this, marketers can always be on top of their niche category and share engaging content with their customers.But what if their customers need help with something? Customer service is a large part of what makes up a brand identity, and now that consumers are used to their electronics being always-on and every form of communication being instant, consumers expect to get personalized help instantly. That’s why some companies are investing in artificially intelligent virtual assistants, such as BMW and their “iGenius” project. The system answers questions about BMW’s electric cars via text, which means holding thousands of conversations at once.iGenius was developed by DigitalGenius, one of many companies developing AI systems for customer service. There’s another important marketing use for these conversational robots: lead generation. Take AVA.ai, for instance, which is “the only provider of lead interaction management software driven by artificial intelligence (AI) for sales.” AVA.ai’s system can handle thousands of email conversations simultaneously with sales leads, and hand off a conversation to a human sales representative when the lead is interested in making a purchase. Yes, human beings are still needed in the marketing process. With the advent artificial intelligence, though, where and when a human being is needed will change. These current examples are only the beginning of the “AI Revolution”, and with every revolution, there’s going to be some problems:What Weaknesses or Problems Does AI Have?The most obvious weakness that artificially intelligent marketers have, which any human marketer would be quick to tell you, is that they aren’t creative. Sure, there might be some AI systems that can paint abstract portraits, and others that can write rap lyrics, but those are more like random-number generators than artists. “Creativity,” especially in the marketing field, means uncovering and translating human emotions into relatable messages. Human marketers should keep their creative edge over AI marketers for some time.AI marketers have another disadvantage: people don’t trust them. In this Information Week article, there is a great explanation of the phenomenon of “Algorithm Avoidance:”"It usually only takes one mistake -- or a perception of a mistake -- to get a human to stop trusting a robot. In 2014, Wharton performed a study in which people were rewarded for making good predictions. They were allowed to use their own predictions, or those of an AI. The algorithms were repeatedly shown to be better than human predictions. Despite that, humans would see individual errors and lose faith in the robots, despite multiple failures of their own.Maybe it’s all the sci-fi movies we watch, but we humans have a hard time getting comfortable around robots. The problem, according to this FastCompany article, is empathy. Cognitive computing and machine learning might be modeled on the human brain, but that doesn’t mean there’s any relatable attributes between the two. There is one similarity, though, and it is the biggest weakness of artificial intelligence:Robots can make bigger mistakes much more quickly than humans can.Have you ever found a glitch in a video game or had your computer crash? Well, artificially intelligent systems can have bugs, too. And since these systems are responsible for making thousands of actions per minute, such as stock trades and programmatic advertising, it’s easy to imagine a worst case scenario...not like the HAL-9000 coup or the Skynet apocalypse, but like a grand-scale typo.Take these “Twitter brand fails,” for instance, in which single tweets caused major headaches for global brands. Now think about what could happen if companies that size started putting their social media, email, and phone outreach into the hands of an AI system. That robot could make one simple marketing mistake that reaches every single customer instantaneously. It’s no wonder humans don’t trust robots…So, to recap: AI systems aren’t as creative as humans, they aren’t as trustworthy as humans, and they can make errors on a much larger scale than humans. If the question was, “Who is the better marketer: humans or robots,” congrats, it’s humans. But that might not be true for long, because artificial intelligence is only going to get better, and there are still plenty of opportunities for robots looking for marketing jobs:What will AI be able to do for marketers in the future?We’ve already covered what artificial intelligence is currently handling for marketers, including programmatic advertising, content creation and distribution, customer service and lead generation. That about covers the whole gamut, but there’s still many more marketing functions that can be turned over to AI. For instance: Content personalization.Remember the robo-journalists? What if you combined these content generation systems with programmatic advertising? You’d have an AI system that could generate custom-tailored content instantly based on the characteristics of the individual user it is being served to.For example, what if Etrade (the online banking and investing company) had an AI system that could generate custom newsletters for each user based on their investment history? There are already AI systems for portfolio management, but what if Etrade’s users could chat their own virtual stock broker in Etrade’s app? That is the kind of grand-scale personalization that will benefit consumers. For companies, there’s another opportunity in community management.How many social media accounts does your company have? Here’s a tougher question: how many social media networks are your customers on? Global Web Index reported an overall average of 5.54 social media accounts for every Internet user in Q4 2014, and that number has likely grown since then. It is almost impossible to keep up with monitoring new social media networks, let alone monitoring your company’s existing social media communities.What if there were an AI system that could “listen” to every social media network on the web for any mention of a company’s brand, measure the overall sentiment of those conversations, and even respond on the company’s behalf? That robot would be the ultimate community manager, which is becoming an increasingly important marketing job.Speaking of marketing jobs, there is one last opportunity for artificial intelligence: Recruiting. What if that community management system from before could also be “listening” on social media networks for potential applicants? It could be the ultimate recruiting agency, spotting skilled and friendly professionals that meet companies’ desired attributes. There could even be AI systems for performing preliminary interviews. Recruiting is time-consuming, and AI systems like that could allow companies to broaden their search and find more ideal applicants in less time.All this talk of artificial intelligence and marketing jobs brings one thing to mind, though...one question concerning the future of marketing...one last question:Will AI Replace All Human Marketing Jobs?INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER(context)If you have any questions about artificial intelligence, the future of marketing, or anything at all, feel free to reach out to Streetwise Studio or me directly @KyleSGibson.