Artificial intelligence (AI)
Artificial intelligence is software that does things we usually think need a human mind, like understanding language or answering questions.
Artificial intelligence, or AI, is software that does tasks we usually think of as needing a human mind: understanding what someone wrote, recognising a face in a photo, translating, answering a question. It's a broad term. It covers everything from a spam filter to ChatGPT.
When people talk about AI in marketing today, they usually mean one kind: large language models, which have learned from huge amounts of text and can read and write in plain language.
How today's AI learns
Older software followed rules a programmer wrote by hand. Most AI today learns from examples instead. Show a system millions of emails marked as spam or not, and it works out the patterns for itself. Show a language model a large share of the public web, and it learns how words, facts and ideas tend to fit together.
That's why AI can be both impressive and wrong. It's very good at producing what usually comes next, and it can state something false with full confidence.
Why it matters to marketers
AI now sits between many customers and the brands they choose. When someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity for a recommendation, an AI reads pages about your market and writes an answer that names some brands and leaves others out.
For example, someone asks an AI assistant for a good coffee subscription for an office. Whether it names Fernhill Coffee depends on what it learned in training and on the pages it reads when it searches the web. Both are things you can influence: what's said about you online, and whether the platforms can read your site.