Can Artificial Intelligence today's Data Dilemna?

By now, we know artificial intelligence will be big. The question is: What else will it bring with it?

In the last four years, deals with AI startups jumped from 160 to 658. Companies are already using it for everything from self-driving cars to remote emotional detection to morality training.

To be sure, those are exciting applications of AI. But there’s a little-known one that, at least for the business world, has even stronger potential to shake things up: It’s called account-based intelligence.

Account-based intelligence is the latest iteration of the age-old one-to-one sales and marketing dream. Jaded marketing and sales executives may scoff, assuming we couldn’t do it then so we can’t do it now. But with AI, we finally have a chance to make it happen.

The Data Dilemma

Today, we’re closer than we’ve ever been toward one-to-one sales and marketing.

Why? For starters, we’re generating more data than ever. Each second, we produce 6,000 tweets, 40,000 Google queries, and 2 million emails. By 2019, global web traffic will surpass 2 zettabytes per year. In layman’s terms, one zettabyte is equivalent to 1 billion terabytes.

Data generation at that scale is the first step toward ABI because it requires granular information about every target company and prospect. But it creates a bigger problem: How can companies possibly dig through that much data for actionable insights?