This is Mark Mueller-Eberstein, your guide through the digital transformation journey. In this module, you will learn about big data and artificial intelligence and how these technologies allow new ways of customer engagement. Many people believe that great marketing is an art form. But big data has added serious stores of science into the mix. Smart marketers are now relying on data more than ever to inform, test and iterate their strategies and continuously improve their execution. Combining the data with machine learning and artificial intelligence creates systems that assist marketers in areas such as market forecasting, automation of processes and even decision making. You can expect to see an increase in the efficiency of tasks, better insight into your customers and their needs as well as more and more abilities to deliver personalized experiences to your clients and customers. Data analytics might never replace the creative minds, the artwork behind the best marketing campaigns. They certainly though can provide those minds with incredible tools and insights that can help all of us to perform even better. This module will help you to discuss and embrace a key technology in the digital transformation of many organizations and even societies. So first, we will define the key terms. Then we will look at data sources and why there's so much more data available than ever before. And where the trends are going. Together we will gain an overview of the market trends and solutions available, and those are emerging today. Especially artificial intelligence though has been controversially discussed over the recent past. We will touch on some of the potential challenges of AI. As Big Data and AI technology have a strong impact on customer engagement, we will immerse deeper into those scenarios and learn from real life examples. With this foundation, we will ultimately look at some of the future trends and guide on how you can use the technologies in your environment. Marketers need to understand the digital transformation driven by big data and artificial intelligence. The jobs will change. If you are doing a job that could conceivably be automated, AI could be more and more for pressing issue as it takes over tasks. Good news though. You are the first wave that is going to transform the customer engagement capabilities for your businesses by leveraging the technologies as your tools. Technology savvy marketers are often going to be the first ones to come up with new ideas for new business models and value propositions that they can take to the market. Companies are competing in the race for enabling AI capabilities to their partners and customers. Giants like Microsoft, Google, IBM, Alibaba and Facebook are some of the key players with billions of dollars invested into research and product development. Global companies though are competing in the race for enabling AI capabilities to their partners and customers. Microsoft, Google, IBM, Alibaba and Facebook are some of the key players with billions of dollars invested into research and product development. Amazon with their Alexa platform is bringing AI to consumers at home. In the process creates a tremendous learning opportunity for their own AI and their development teams. Look for the opportunities in these upcoming changes. Data will be everywhere and available but controlled by individuals not central organizations. Asking the right questions through artificial intelligence will be a key competitive differentiator for customer engagement. You need to watch for change in social media and search marketing. Social media and search are going to be disrupted with the data ownership shifting. The rise of artificial intelligence and personal data ownership will diminish the value of search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Shared not harvested data will feed metrics as they shift to a holistic understanding of the market. Artificial intelligence is allowing marketing professionals to keep staying in touch and to manage the customer engagement dialogue at scale, for example with bots, with an individual attention feeling. The synergies of big data and artificial intelligence with other key technologies, especially IoT, blockchain technology, mobile are creating amounts of data nearly impossible to imagine. And will shift marketing and advertisement strategies and approaches. Imagine the impact on advertising alone. When tomorrow we combine AI with blockchain technology. And there's no need to waste 50 percent of advertisement budget anymore. Because we will know who is interested in our messaging and we will pay them to listen to it. AI will tell us who we need to talk to, when and how with what message and information. In this course of digital transformation, we are exploring how cutting edge technologies will shape customer engagement over the next decade. Please, engage in the forums of discussions so we can all learn, explore and experiment together. None of us have all the answers but asking questions will get us closer to a deeper understanding. Questions are so important. I would like to quote Kevin Kelly, one of the most impressive thinkers on technology. Kelly wrote in his book "The Inevitable", understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape our future. He said "A good question is the seed of innovation in science, technology, art, politics and business. A good question is a probe of what-if scenario. A good question skirts at the edge of what is known and not known. Neither silly nor obvious. A good question can not be predicted. A good question will be the sign of an educated mind. A good question is one that generates many other good questions. A good question may be the last job a machine will learn to do. A good question is what humans are for." And that is especially important to remember as we're discussing artificial intelligence and our human future enrolls in this new world. What do you think? Please, share your thoughts in the forum.
