When a friend introduced me to Esther Dyson -- technology thought leader and investor -- I jumped at the chance to ask about her ideas on AI.

If a career in plastics (according to "The Graduate") was a virtual guarantee of success in the 1960s or 1970s, what is the equivalent for the age of artificial intelligence - i.e., 2017 onward? Data scientist? Maybe; maybe not.

I first met Amy Ingram through an email she sent to arrange a meeting with the CEO of a New York AI company. My exchanges with her were peppered with phrases like "I'm sorry," "Have a nice weekend," "Thank you." I had no idea Amy Ingram was a bot.

If you believe the world's foremost (publicly available) artificial intelligence, I am much more intellectually curious, emotionally aware, sensitive to beauty and willing to try new things than just about all of you. Apparently, I'm also a bit of a boorish jerk: I value my own interests over yours, I'm extremely skeptical of your motives, I don't try to help others, and I take virtually no pleasure in life.

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.