One particularly arresting moment in William Gibson's cyberpunk classic, Neuromancer, occurs toward the end when Case, the protagonist, meets the eponymous and anthropomorphized AI face-to-face.

The days of advertising campaigns founded primarily on big creative ideas appear to be dwindling, and data is stepping up to play more of a leading role. A recent Forrester report written by Joe Stanhope, "AI Must Master the Basics Before It Can Transform Marketing," points to numerous ways we can expect content and creative to be more closely tied to data strategies in order to achieve "efficiency, smarter decisions, speed, continuous performance improvement, and customer journey optimization." In a conversation about the study, Stanhope said Forrester clients are asking for more ways to create content personalization, and AI tools ...

Analysts are still unpacking last weekend's Apple developer conference announcements, but here's the bottom line: The dramatic impact of artificial intelligence that I've been exhorting marketers to recognize and align with will happen even faster than I imagined.

Being a fast-follower may not work when it comes to artificial intelligence. That's a potentially huge problem for the vast majority of companies - the mainstream of American and global businesses that have watched and waited as wave after wave of new technologies emerged over the course of the last 20 years.

Unlike March, April had no $15 billion deals for artificial intelligence technology. What's more, not one April AI deal included an announced value. But the number of deals AI picked up - nine - remained well above last year's average of six per month. Being a long-time observer of tech M&A, however, I've seen this pattern before. While I don't expect another $15 billion deal all that soon, the combination of low value plus (relatively) high deal volume usually means timing is a factor. Expect more large AI deals to come.

For the latest/greatest marketing technology -- and, more to the point, still-emerging machine-learning capabilities -- to really create awesome value, marketers must connect it to brands' emotional roots. Only by combining technology with core insights about the emotions motivating human behavior can we genuinely touch hearts and minds -- and thereby influence behavior.

Artificial intelligence offers endless possibilities for marketers - and everyone else, for that matter. It can predict disease from patient records far better and faster than any human method, and it can drive cars far more safely. For marketers, it can improve audience insights, helping us to better understand what content will most engage them. It can individualize ad campaigns, automatically, and at scale. But there's a problem looming: the most advanced computer intelligences cannot explain their thinking. They can't say why they do what they do.

Perhaps, like me, you're amazed and also find it ironic that some iconic science fiction stories are coming true. The Jetson's original video chat, for instance, is now part of everyday life.

I can't decide which aspect of this story astounds me more - the fact that a consumer medical device with capabilities akin to Dr. McCoy's tricorder has been successfully prototyped, or that it was done by two brothers from Pennsylvania, one an ER doctor and the other an engineer, who beat out a Taiwanese consumer electronics giant.

Here are the top four advertising/marketing AI tech startups, as agreed on by CB Insights and Fortune magazine.