A frictionless buying experience offers the customers a good mix of both—a delightfully automated product experience punctuated by the sales handshake when needed.

Data that is commonly stored by companies including customer details, emails, loyalty schemes, transactions, data collection and bank details needs to be protected.

Every fourth person I meet talks about big data and data analytics. In fact, we are in times where people are investing in big data and data analytics like never before. Yet, some of the questions that continue to haunt us are:

When I first heard the phrase “mass personalization,” I thought that it seemed to be a contradiction of terms. How can it be mass if it is personalized? How can it be personalized if it is for the masses? But it is not an oxymoron after all. The movement to Big Data and, in particular, to Artificial Intelligence has meant that we can process billions and trillions of data points and – in discovering patterns in consumer behaviors – generate unique responses to specific triggers.

We all know that selling cloud solutions is different compared to other solutions because the pricing depends upon usage metrics such as bandwidth, storage etc. In other words, salespeople need to have an insight into the future behavior of their prospects. From a skill standpoint, the one selling cloud solution needs to have the ability to shift the customer organization’s IT budgets from CAPEX to OPEX. It is a challenge as well as a great opportunity for recurring revenue.

According to Teradata’s ‘State of AI for Enterprises’ report in October 2017, 80% of enterprises have active AI in production today, with Asia-Pacific leading all regions. With all the major tech companies reorienting themselves around AI and the announcement of self-driven cars from several automobile majors, we can say with conviction, that the AI wave has arrived.

The most basic aspect of striking a conversation with someone is to converse about something that would interest them. Yet, in a B2B business scenario, we are too focused on what we would like to sell rather than trying to know where a customer stands in their business journey, what their priorities are at that given point in time and more. All we do is, go after the leads assigned to us on our CRM.

In a connected world where things are linked to other things and people, there are multiple touchpoints to manage. To a marketer, this means – they have to manage these touchpoints, which are invariably expected to increase in the days to come.

Right from the beginning of the year 2019, you could almost say that there is no doubt on the impact AI will have in the upcoming years. Reports from IDC states that the adoption of cognitive systems and AI will result in a drastic revenue increase worldwide from nearly $8 billion in 2016 to upwards of $47 billion in 2020.