New feature: What does the future hold? A question we are all asking. Charles Nixon will get out his crystal ball each week to look at the changes we may see. Charles considers how long do changes take to become normal. For example will facemasks become as normal in the Western World as they have been in China.

Today he considers that some current trends have become accelerated, such as online shopping and the adoption of apps .In particular, he discusses the importance of localism and loyalty from the local community.

AI for marketing

Then I am joined by Graham Berridge, software engineer and architect at Tessella. He explains that we can view AI like Skynet from the Terminator and "grey goo", but actually AI has moved to become part of day-to-day life, eg the use of speech cognition and recommender systems. He explains the two main types of AI: pattern matching and predicting systems. Prediction systems use data such as weather, your past purchases, other customers' purchases to make a recommendation. This means that one of the key issues is the quality of the data.

AI is used in marketing in areas such as natural language response for customer service, pricing comparisons and predicting the effect, and sentiment analysis. Graham explains that a lot of smaller companies are starting to use AI as there are many tools to use with simple tutorials such as Tensorflow. His advice for marketers is to be clear what you want and not to over-fit the data.

Podcasters' guide to acronyms: related to AI, we have AR Augmented Reality where you are adding elements to a view eg Pokemon Go! or translating a road sign into your native language.